Windows XP Service Pack 1 is out and available here. We had better luck with the network install. The network install is a lot larger; however, the update wizard that was supposed to download just what our workstation needed timed out when contacting the server. A retry started the whole download again. A straight download […]
Windows XP Service Pack 1
Rotating a Video with Mencoder
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.
Managing Disk Quotas on Windows 2000 / XP
One challenge for systems administrators is convincing users to store their files on a network share rather than on their local hard drive. Disk quotas on Windows 2000 and XP can be used to force users to do just that. To enable disk quotas for the users, log on as an administrator, right click on […]
Xfce Tips
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
Getting Eterm Compiled
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 […]
Funky MP3 Car Players, and the Scripts That Load Them
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 […]
Tricking out your desktop with Blackbox
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 […]
Starting NVIDIA Drivers Automatically
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 […]
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
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 […]
Change Default Printer on Windows Using Defprint
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 […]
GNUCash 1.6.2 Compile/Installation
[[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 […]
Gentoo 1.4_rc2
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 […]
Gnome 1.4 from Source
[[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 […]
Fix Pesky Backspace Problems With Terminals
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 […]
Running Native Sim City on Ubuntu
Yes, yes… no time for games, usually, but sometimes a little Sunday gaming can be fun. For grins, we did a bit of googling, and found that Micropolis is available on Ubuntu. We happen to be running 12.10: apt-get install micropolis Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following extra […]
Fixing WMI Corruption on Windows 7
We had a workstation that wasn’t getting updates properly. Here are some items in the logs we noticed: Event ID 43: Windows Management Instrumentation ADAP failed to connect to namespace \\.\root\cimv2 with the following error 0x80041002 And: Event ID 1090: Windows failed to record Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) information, which describes the scope of […]
