One of the most likely parts to fail on a typical workstation is the hard drive. The user powers on in the morning, and the BIOS screams “Unable to Boot!”. Now, much work can often be done via the web, or at least, the user won’t freak as much if they can at least access […]

If you import a rotated video off of your phone or other device, here is a quick command to rotate it 90 degrees: mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o hx.avi -oac pcm -ovc lavc hx.mo Some more details are in How to rotate an AVI or MPEG file taken in Portrait.

If you lose your borders around your windows in Xfce4 and your mouse pointer over the desktop is wonky try: xfwm4 –replace rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions

Eterm is awful cool. One problem, though, is getting the Imlib2 and Freetype dependencies worked out. I’m assuming that Freetype2 is installed and running, as well as dependencies for KDE. This should be the case for most distributions and if you follow the BLFS instructions for KDE. Also, check out an article from 2001 on […]

Oh my. I had no idea about what was running my music. Now I know quite a bit more, and I thought I would share. My collection is very convoluted, but I didn’t know it. No, I had no idea. How did I get to the messy state I’m at today? I started converting my […]

After Ximian locking up my console hard, and general disgust with complicated window managers, I decided to trick out a minimalistic window manager. For those of you that are interested, check out Blackbox. The source is 235k. I kid you not. Funny thing is that I wanted to use a more configurable xterm, so I […]

If you have a Linux box and an NVIDIA card, the best drivers are available directly from NVIDIA here. If, after installing the drivers, they don’t start up automatically, you may need to add the correct alias to your /etc/modules.conf file. I’m going to assume that you are running a 2.4 kernel with loadable modules […]

The lack of a web browser that works well with Linux is one of my (and many other peoples) big complaints. For those network administrators out there contemplating a migration to GNU/Linux on the desktop, the traditionally buggy performance and lack of features of web browsers for Linux is a huge stumbling block. I have […]

If you wish to change the default printer on a users Windows box via a script, defprint is what you need. Stuart Anderson wrote this fine piece of freeware; however, the site referenced in the file is not available. We put a copy up on NetAdminTools here. Use defprint /P to list your printers: C:>defprint […]

[[LFS Notes: This article worked.. kinda… for my existing Red Hat 7.1 system, and was actually the inspiration for exploring LFS. See the GNUCash 1.6.3/LFS article.]] A few days ago I wrote about improvements in Mozilla. The release of the new Mozilla has made my desktop experience with GNU/Linux oodles better. I decided to push […]

We decided to give Gentoo GNU/Linux a try. We had tested a previous incarnation, but weren’t entirely happy. This time, though, we were impressed enough that Agatha is using it as her main workstation now. For those of you unfamiar with Gentoo GNU/Linux, it is a source-based distribution. Sorcerer, and LFS are other examples. LFS […]

[[LFS Note: This article was based on my Red Hat 7.1 install. See GNUCash 1.6.3/LFS and the hint on LFS for more info on installing Gnome for LFS or you want to dig really deep into the libraries.]] In the article on GNUCash 1.6.2 Compile/Installation I mentioned that Gnome was more stable after I had […]

One thing I like about Eterm is that the users of Eterm, and the author, are serious terminal geeks. I’ve often wondered how, exacty, the backspace works (or doesn’t work). As I flit around different systems and programs, the behaviour is often different. Anyway, I ran across a nice tidbit here that explains what is […]

[[LFS Note: The below procedure works fine with LFS 3.0]] In my continuing search for compatibility, stability and performance, I decided to compile XFree86 4.1.0 from source and install it. I removed the RPMs for my version earlier version of X, as well as Freetype. I also removed my old fonts. I didn’t have any […]

In this article, I fixed my backspace, and it has worked since on every system I’ve logged on to. I had one lingering problem though. When I select text in Vim by highlighting with the first mouse button clicked, when I paste the selection into another terminal, I get extra newlines. This is really nasty, […]

I discussed compiling XFree86 from source in my article XFree86 4.1.0 from Source. One problem if you nuke all associated RPMs, is that the Athena Widget Set is included in the XFree86 distribution. This is in xc/lib/Xaw of the XFree86 source tree. What is a Widget Set? Well, this is the style of buttons and […]