Desktop Diet!

A great presentation by Rasterman, the head coder of Enlightenment.



I tried out E17 the other day, and it's not as good as I hoped it would be. Ah well!

Happy Linux Thoughts

I'd just like to post a link to a great linux blog:

HappyLinuxThoughts

Linux Blog Online

I'd just like to tell everyone about this blog - it's informative, interesting and funny!

enjoy!

Scrambled Xvnc Keyboard Mapping on Ubuntu Feisty

This is just a bug workaround:

If you log in through Xvnc (I use it with xinetd) and see the gdm screen, log in to gnome fine, but then after that your keyboard comes out scrambled, here's a quick and dirty fix (you'll have to do this from a console that is working, maybe SSH?):

sudo mv /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.us /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.us.bkup

Of course, this only works if you were using the US keyboard layout. This is not ideal, but it gets the job done in this particular case.

The fix for this is apparently already in the upstream code and should be available in the next gnome update from Ubuntu.

Resolve Windows Machine Name

First, add "wins" to the end of your hosts: line in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

Second, run apt-get install winbind.

This will allow your DNS to resolve "windows" network-neighborhood style machine names (Samba, SMB, Network Name Resolution)

iGoogle is not My Google.

This is not strictly open source related, but it is in the interests of most Internet users, so:

I'm surprised that no one has spraypainted an "i" in front of their logo on their building after what they've done to Google Personalized Home.

The consensus seems to be that everyone tolerated Google Personalized Home because it gave us some good toys to play with, but as soon as they changed the name to iGoogle that was one step too far. Our favorite search engine now looked tacky and obviously is being driven by someone from the traditional side of Internet marketing instead of the normal trendy Google-type folks.

Well, I came up with a hack that will remove iGoogle, sort of. At first, I tried to remove the new iGoogle Logo, but to no avail. I tried everything. I even replaced the header section with a search box module. None of it felt right. Even if I switched out the logo, the best I could do was use past holiday logos, no thanks! Maybe this hack will be for you:

The reason I use iGoogle is to look at the modules on occasion. I want to use "Classic" search, however. So I came up with a URL that will take you to iGoogle *once*, and immediately unset the cookie value that keeps you at iGoogle. So, I made a Bookmark in my Bookmark Toolbar Folder called "iGoogle Once" and pointed it to this URL:

http://www.google.com/ig?sa=p&pref=ig&pval=1&q=/webhp

If you want to give it a whirl, just try it here. You can see your iGoogle page, with all the modules, and you can even search, and then if you go back to Google.com it takes you to Google Classic, instead of "remembering" that you selected iGoogle and throwing you back into it.

There is one caveat: You must click "Classic Home" once before this will work, and if you click "iGoogle" on the top of the home page, it will keep you on iGoogle until you click Classic Home again. In other words, you must only use the "iGoogle Once" bookmark to visit iGoogle lest you become iTrapped.

I hope this was useful!

Getting rid of the tooltips in the Gnome panel

Tooltips in the panel seem pointless to me, they hardly ever tell you more information that you can already gather by just reading the menu entry. If you are using Compiz or Beryl and have menu effects turned on, all those tooltips popping up and sparkling everywhere could get old very fast.

Here's how to get rid of them:

Open a terminal and type gconf-editor. This should open the Gnome Configuration Editor. Navigate to Apps > Panel > Global and uncheck tooltips_enabled. Enjoy your tooltip-free Gnome Panel!