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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Are you tired of looking at an ugly bash prompt like this?: -bash-2.05b$ Well, if you add this line to your .bash_profile: export PS1=’\[\033[01;31m\]\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]’ You will get a red hostname (up to the first .) and a blue current working directory: servername directory $ For more info, see the prompting section of […]

In this article I showed how to update the background of an X desktop with various text status dumps. I have been using IceWM because it has always been the most stable window manager. It was also useful when bringing up an OS from source, as IceWM can be compiled quickly. KDE has a lot […]

You can use these two commands to set the Gnome desktop background: gconftool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /path/pic.png gconftool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options “centered” This will put the picture in the center. If you want to fill the background with the picture use stretched.

Gozer needs libgiblib to work right. I like to install strange libraries like this into /usr/local/lib. I put all of the source into /usr/local/src that isn’t part of the main RPM system. Even when I compiled and installed giblib, though, it wouldn’t work right: [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ gozer gozer: error while loading shared libraries: libgiblib.so.1: cannot […]

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

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 […]

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 […]