Alexander Engelhardt's questions

I'm trying to analyze an enormous text file (1.6GB), whose data lines look like this:

20090118025859 -2.400000 78.100000 1023.200000 0.000000
20090118025900 -2.500000 78.100000 1023.200000 0.000000
20090118025901 -2.400000 78.100000 1023.200000 0.000000

I don't even know how many lines there are. But I'm trying to split the file by date. The left number is a time stamp (these lines are from 2009, January 18th).
How can I split this file into pieces according to the date?

Everything I know would be to grep file '20090118*' > data20090118.dat , but there sure is a way to do all the dates at once, right?

The number of entries per date differ, so using split with a constant number won't work.

Thanks in advance,
Alex

Is there a way to convert a FAT partition to ext3 (or other ext..) while keeping the data on it? I don't have access to a external USB hard disk to temporarily store the data, so I'd like to just convert it while the data sits on the partition. Is that possible?

My Lucid install won't boot properly anymore. I can boot the computer with a USB-stick-ubuntu and edit settings. I have edited grub.cfg to not boot "quiet splash" and changed the default runlevel to 1.

When continuing to boot from the recovery menu, I get this line:

init: rsyslog main process ended, respawning.

I did a aptitude reinstall rsyslog, which changed nothing. Does someone have an idea where to continue searching for the cause?

Thanks in advance,

I installed Kubuntu on a spare work computer and I am now configuring it for the standard user's needs. My goal is to install it on 4 rarely used PCs for them to play around with, and maybe put it on their own computer some time.

There is some stuff I want to be the same on every computer (e.g. Thunderbird instead of Evolution, the mail-in and mail-out server of the users), and stuff that needs to be customized on every machine, like hostname, a different user on each PC...

Also, the computers have differently sized hard drives. Will a 10GB image pushed onto a 300GB hard drive "break" the file system so it seems to be only 10GB big? Sorry, this is hard to explain in English.

Does anyone know of a way to generate a custom image of a full hard disk sda1 as /, sda2 as swap and sda3 as /home? Also, if I just burn the .iso on a DVD I won't be able to boot and push the image on the HDD, right?

I have very bassy speakers, and when I watch videos at night, I either can't understand the people talking, or have too much bass for my neighbors. Is there a way to drop the basses of the audio output? Like maybe an audio "proxy", or a video player with built-in equalizer (like audacious or xmms have for music).

I tried mplayer's equalizer function, but it somehow didn't work.

Is there a way to control if your microphone and webcam is on? Or an easy way to securely disable it while you don't need it?

I have a webcam and microphone built in to my notebook, which I never really need. I'm just curious if programs or websites can easily access them.

I'm trying to set up an image of Ubuntu Lucid to install on some PCs at work. For that I'd like to add and remove some programs, settings, menus etc. I've heard about the /etc/skel directory.

If I configure both desktops and copy /my/ whole home-directory to /etc/skel, what will happen to the permissions? Also, are there any files referring to absolute paths, i.e. /home/alexxhardt/.. etc?