Tag: command

  • Find a Windows Vista MAC Address

    Yesterday eve I had to add a laptop to my network which is using MAC address filtering. The laptop ran Windows Vista and I tried to locate its MAC address by using the good old ipconfig within a command prompt. This gave no results as apparently the network details only get listed once an actual network connection is made. As you probably have realised this is a catch-22 situation as without the MAC address registered on the router I was never going to make a network connection in the first place…!

    Actually the weird thing is that the MAC address is normally on a sticker on the bottom of laptops, but in this case there was no such sticker.

    Google as in most other cases provided a quick fix by pointing me in the right direction. There is a command specifically for this task named funnily enough: getmac.

  • Empty Trash from the terminal

    For some reason I can not recall I went into my Trash bin on Fedora. There was unsurprisingly a lot of trash!

    I decided to empty the Trash bin but it only succeeded partially. I had a DVD directory that did not want to be deleted. Looking closer at the message it was a permissions error. Not sure how though, since if I did not have permissions to delete the directory from the Trash bin, how on Earth could I have moved it into the Trash bin to start with…!

    Looking around my home directory in the terminal I could not locate the exact spot to manually remove the directory. As always Google came to assistance and brought up a nice forum topic about how to empty the Trash bin in Fedora from the terminal.

    The simplest way would be to run the following command as root:

    rm -rf  ~/.local/share/Trash/files/*

  • Home and End keys in PuTTY

    I wondered why sometimes the Home and End keys work as expected during a SSH session via PuTTY and some other times it just writes tildes (~) instead. When writing long commands it is a real annoyance having to press down the left arrow to get back to the beginning of the command.

    A simple solution which worked for me was to change the Terminal-type String under the Connection > Data tab from the default “xterm” to simply “linux”:

    PuTTY Terminal Type String

    Now you should be able to use your Home and End keys to easily move the cursor back and forth during a SSH session using PuTTY.