tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32317284823799705882012-01-25T19:25:12.202ZA computer diary. My day-2-day discoveries on Linux, errors, how-tos and things I want to remember.PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.comBlogger10001100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-86682123504045793122012-01-12T23:50:00.001Z2012-01-12T23:53:03.802Z

I've become a big fan of Kindle apps and devices and use the iPad Kindle app almost exclusively to do my extensive reading. So, I downloaded the Kindle app for my Mac from here. When you open it up and sign in with your Kindle account (or is it called an Amazon account?) all ebooks that you have previously bought from Amazon will automatically appear in your library. However, I have a lot of

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-68256129371526853692012-01-11T23:30:00.002Z2012-01-11T23:32:34.205Z

I use SoloFTP to set up an FTP server on Haiku (post R1A3) and it works well in connecting to the in-built FTP client on my Mac (Lion). However, while SoloFTP readily allows files/folders to be transferred to the Mac, the FTP client doesn't allow uploads. But, Transmit (4.1.7) readily overcomes this problem. Indeed, Transmit, which is not inexpensive at US$34, is a quality piece of software.

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-61530405436059062902012-01-06T23:32:00.000Z2012-01-06T23:32:10.318Z

Having described how well the FTPpositive FTP client works in Haiku, I next tried out the SoloFTP server for Haiku. This too works well at least in connecting to the Mac client. In addition, I could easily connect to Solo in Haiku r43592 on my Dell E520 from NcFTP in Ubuntu 11.10 on my EeePC901. NcFTP is a very nice command line FTP client with an extensive command list. The get and put commands

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-23693620160184858832011-12-31T23:47:00.000Z2011-12-31T23:47:21.102Z

OK, my last post of 2011 and this deals with yet another advance in the ever more impressive Haiku OS. I'm using a recent nightly hrev43583 which works perfectly in everything I've tried so far. Came across some recent comments and correspondence on FTP Positive in Haikuware which is a FTP client for Haiku. Seems to work for some people but not for others. First, I needed to set up an FTP server

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-36661563118589618922011-12-29T23:48:00.000Z2011-12-29T23:48:57.509Z

I type in both English and Brazilian Portuguese on my Mac which is where I do the majority of my work. OS X puts a convenient icon in the upper panel from where I can very easily switch from one keymap to the other. I describe here how I set this up on the Mac. Well, now I can do exactly the same in Haiku on both my EeePC and my Dell E520. However, you need to be just a little careful. First,

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-2581011798580372862011-12-26T23:29:00.000Z2011-12-26T23:29:11.995Z

I do a lot of reading on my iPad primarily using the Kindle app. I particularly like the dictionary function which only requires you to touch the word you want to define, whereupon a definition appears at the bottom of the screen. Touch screen page turning is also very useful. The Kindle 4 that I got has no touch screen which I miss. Also the screen is not backlit which means you need a light on

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-48530972336829378662011-12-24T23:28:00.004Z2011-12-26T23:30:20.705Z

My iPhone4 shows, in the upper right hand corner, not only an icon with a rough indication of how full or empty the battery is, but additionally you can go to Settings > General > Usage and tap on the Battery Percentage. Thereafter, the exact state of your battery is displayed alongside the battery icon. However, although the battery icon is present, this feature is not available on my iPhone

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-80021406225917451042011-12-22T23:24:00.000Z2011-12-22T23:24:00.594Z

I found out yesterday that my new ISP seems to be doing just that. I was downloading the Ubuntu 11.10 iso by the recommended torrent route when I found my super high d/l rate (more than 1 MB/s) suddenly reduced to a remarkably steady 9.4-9.8 kB/s. As the iso is a 700 MB download, this would have taken almost a full day. Now, that's ridiculous! However, getting over the problem is very easy as

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-18757250974822997992011-12-20T23:23:00.001Z2011-12-20T23:24:37.420Z

iTunes allows you very easily to locate, download and add album covers for your iTunes music library as explained here. However, for various reasons, it may not find all the covers. A principal reason is if the album name in your library is not EXACTLY as written in the online artwork source. Indeed, you may be able to get iTunes to correctly locate an album cover by searching the correct album

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-37280526677240776332011-12-14T23:40:00.000Z2011-12-14T23:40:33.815Z

I've been using Eircom as my ISP for ten years and during that time the service has been very reliable. The download speed started at 1 Mbps and slowly made it's way up to 8 Mbps over the first 8-9 years. Recently, a further upgrade was announced to 12 Mbps. However, my internet suddenly became very unreliable and, at times, even unusable. Turns out that the line into our house wasn't able to

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-52649939737756793792011-12-13T23:09:00.001Z2011-12-13T23:10:25.302Z

This is my first post for a very long time as I was in Brazil for about a month. I have to say that I had some disappointing, but by no means tragic, experiences and my enduring love for Brazil is somewhat dented as a result. Maybe, however, it's just that the more I learn about the human race, the more disenchanted I become and perhaps it's unfair to ascribe my bad experiences to just one

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-74843631667991199512011-11-06T00:12:00.002Z2011-11-06T00:30:34.088Z

I've already posted on installing Ubuntu Oneiric to two other computers here and this time I tried it on my little EeePC 901 which is closing in on 4 years old but still performs amazingly. As I multiboot this machine, I use a root partition size of just 4.2 GB. However, this was insufficient to upgrade to Oneiric from Natty for which a minimum root partition size of 4.5GB is needed. Now, the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-58680335236369453932011-10-25T23:31:00.002+01:002011-10-25T23:40:56.953+01:00

I came across a nice little app in Haikuware called FRiSS which is an RSS feeds reader. It works very well for me. Indeed, it has an advantage over the Conky RSS reader which, as I mentioned in my post, does not allow clicking the headlines to get to the full page. But, FRiSS does. In addition, the small FRiSS window you can see on my screenshot cycles through all three of the feeds I have added

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-43687486734665621142011-10-20T23:17:00.001+01:002011-10-20T23:18:12.120+01:00

A couple of days ago, I was lamenting the demise of the Stanza ebook reader in iOS5 and reluctantly expressed my best-of-a-bad-lot preference for the iPad Kindle app as a substitute. Now, I liked the English dictionary in Stanza and used it regularly. However, as I read in a number of other languages (including Portuguese and French) I very much regretted that no equivalent dictionaries were

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-62615270039024410932011-10-19T23:37:00.000+01:002011-10-19T23:37:56.392+01:00

Yes, my Dell E520, which is about 5 years old, has a nVidia GeForce 7300 LE gfx card. I had some problems using Ubuntu 11.04 with this card and needed to install a legacy nVidia driver for full functionality. Well, I upgraded from Natty to Ocelot last week and just could not get a functional Desktop. In general, what happened on boot was I was unable to progress past the login page. After logging

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-21536672218631860102011-10-18T00:24:00.001+01:002011-10-18T16:34:23.554+01:00

I reported that I updated my iPad to iOS5 last week and, quite honestly, other than the new notifications drop-down and iCloud, there really wasn't an awful lot to excite me. You can check out this Lifehacker post for more details on the main features of iOS5. However, I was really disappointed to find that Stanza, by far my favorite ebook reader, does not work in iOS5. This was apparently known

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-2342756764565845022011-10-15T23:56:00.002+01:002011-10-16T00:07:08.575+01:00

Perhaps I was a little too excited, but I started to download and install iOS5 on my iPad (original iPad) within minutes of it being launched last Wednesday (12/10/2011). In retrospect, this was a mistake. The download was very slow. Although, initially the "time remaining" was given as 12 minutes, this kept steadily increasing until it eventually reached about 40 minutes. Twitter was

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-47383050691348610422011-10-08T16:53:00.003+01:002011-10-08T21:20:27.688+01:00

I've been following the development of the Haiku OS for nearly four years now and still remain enthralled by it's lightening fast boot and its many other distinctive features. Now, I've got Haiku working on my EeePC901 netbook with WPA2 wireless encryption and this is really another remarkable milestone in the evolution of this OS. A week or so ago, the availability of wpa_supplicant on Haiku was

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-74808403586390378932011-10-06T23:07:00.002+01:002011-10-06T23:16:12.606+01:00

I added these newsfeeds to my conky display in Ubuntu 11.04 with the help of this post which is in Portuguese. I essentially just copied the .conkyrc from the link, substituted my preferred news sources, commented out the fifth news source in the link as I only wanted four. Then I had to increase the minimum_size (last line before TEXT) to "minimum_size 1600 0" which is what I need for my

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-51999015439217345392011-10-02T23:11:00.000+01:002011-10-02T23:11:23.916+01:00

Well, I don't believe my MacBook 2.26 GHz late 2009 is particularly slow but I came across this thread in Quora, particularly the post by Andrea Eldridge, and tried out some of the recommendations. I was certainly intrigued by the claim that I was going to be shocked at how much faster my computer would run. Following the link in Andrea's post I reduced my startup apps from 10 to 5, removed 5 of

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-69814505071514383232011-09-30T16:57:00.005+01:002012-01-05T23:35:23.672Z

I haven't posted anything for a while as I've been in Brazil for nearly a month. Speaking of Brazil, I've been puzzled for some time about how to get a true Brazilian keyboard on my MacBook. When I choose Brazilian in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources, the resulting keyboard is no different from the default US English keyboard. For this reason, I had been using a Portuguese keyboard

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-90795175241030628512011-09-04T13:47:00.008+01:002011-09-04T16:55:07.316+01:00

In my last post on this topic I revealed that FreeBSD 8.2 had been installed and was working well on my Asus EeePC 901 netbook. Now, I've cleaned things up a lot and the OS is looking very good now that I've got sound, wifi and the webcam working. Incidentally, with all that I have installed, the /usr slice which is 8.9 GB in size still has 2.1 GB available. Wifi This machine has a Ralink2860

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-54463187544367521102011-08-31T23:55:00.002+01:002011-09-01T00:09:15.190+01:00

OK, now things are looking an awful lot better and, in retrospect, it really wasn't that difficult. In my last post, I pointed out that installing the source tree before starting to install xorg and gnome2 seemed to be essential although I don't believe I've come across this advice either in the FreeBSD forums or Handbook. That's strange, it can't be just something required for the EeePC 901.

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-5230716088410698552011-08-27T22:57:00.003+01:002011-08-28T00:11:31.759+01:00

I haven't posted on this topic since Chapter 4 last Wednesday. The reason is that after installing x11/xorg from ports, installing x11/gnome2 from ports is proving mysteriously difficult. While I did have some problems installing gnome2 from ports on my Desktop, I had nothing like the gravity of the problems I'm seeing on the netbook. Nevertheless, I'm unable to see which special features of a

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-17912643812733717012011-08-27T19:45:00.002+01:002011-08-27T19:53:20.349+01:00

When I connect my iPad or other iOS device to my MacBook, the reason is almost exclusively to to charge it. But iPhoto persists in opening -- quite unnecessarily other than to annoy me. Luckily this is easy to stop. Just plug in your iOS device, open Image Capture from your Apps folder. At the bottom left of the Image Capture window, you will see "Connecting this iPad opens" followed by a

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-26389876494864527612011-08-25T23:24:00.002+01:002011-08-26T00:20:55.622+01:00

Yes, while plugging away installing gnome2 from ports in FreeBSD on my netbook, I decided to try to get rid of some minor annoyances in the the same OS on my Dell E520 Desktop. First was that even though I specified one of the OpenDNS servers in the network config section of the FreeBSD installer, according to /etc/resolv.conf the only DNS server was 192.168.1.254. But, this is easily overcome by

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-36049901998781417432011-08-24T16:20:00.006+01:002011-08-24T23:34:54.523+01:00

OK, I started this chapter, as I mentioned in the previous one, by doing a very large reorganization of my ssd's which mainly featured eliminating LinuxMint as I never really used it and had little or no interest in it as it's very little different from Ubuntu. So, now I have a 1.7GB partition for Ubuntu /home and a 2.2GB partition for Haiku R1A3 on the smaller (~4GB) ssd. On the larger disk, I

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-90876472443952596842011-08-22T23:17:00.002+01:002011-08-23T00:27:07.674+01:00

The port install of gnome2 continued for a total of about 36 hours. including two overnight sessions. In total, the compile stopped, because /usr had reached 109% full, a total of 5 times. In each case I ran a "make clean" in the /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 directory which always freed up substantial space on /usr. Finally, however, usage of /usr had reached 3.9GB with a total size of 4.9GB and it

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-41483274835349396242011-08-21T23:11:00.003+01:002011-08-21T23:59:22.835+01:00

To see where I left things yesterday, have a look at this post. On this EeePC 901, which has only 20GB of SSD space on two SSD's (4GB and 16GB), space is at a premium. I already had Ubuntu Natty, Haiku R1A3 and LinuxMint 11 on this machine together with Ubuntu Ocelot (in Beta). So, as I knew FreeBSD was not small, Ocelot had to be sacrificed leaving me with 4.5GB of space for FreeBSD. During the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-52223701761998127042011-08-21T00:00:00.002+01:002011-08-21T00:26:09.618+01:00

I've installed FreeBSD on two desktops in recent times without any significant problems. Now I wanted to see if I could get it installed on my EeePC 901 which would add to the challenge by having no optical drive and very limited SSD space AND I'm multibooting here. The first problem meant that I needed to install from a usb-stick for which there are quite a few guides such as here, here and

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-72845379647812734632011-08-20T22:57:00.003+01:002011-08-20T23:48:11.643+01:00

I've already posted on this topic but this is an update after my recent re-install of FreeBSD on the Dell E520. The essential steps are: 1. Install from ports both Conky and Conkyforecast (Conkyemail is also available in ports) 2. Create a ~/.conkyrc file. There are many examples available on the web and one that I'm using in FreeBSD is here. 3. To enable Conky to pick up your CPU core

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-23923476875627831012011-08-16T22:55:00.003+01:002011-08-16T23:30:42.011+01:00

I had posted previously about getting Flash in both Midori and Opera, and here too., which were the browsers I was using in FreeBSD at the time. Now I'm using Chromium 13.0.782.107 and like it better than the other two because it's fast and allows favicon bookmarking. Yes, I know it has extensions, but quite honestly, I really don't have a lot of use for that stuff. So, how do you get flash in

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-33825275509339413082011-08-14T23:22:00.002+01:002011-08-14T23:55:43.349+01:00

Haiku OS does not yet support flash or HTML5 so you cannot watch YouTube videos. Of course, there are always ways around these sorts of temporary omissions. Greentube is one although it seems neither relaible nor consistent to me in the few times I've tried it. I've noticed another in Haikuware called YAVTD but I haven't tried this one. However, I saw a post to the Haiku forum today which

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-16899019498767050252011-08-13T16:32:00.002+01:002011-08-13T17:07:03.216+01:00

I like the "almost touchscreen" features in Lion such that you use the touchpad to quickly move between workspaces including the Dashboard, scroll up or down on a page and, by deftly squeezing the touchpad, show all of your available apps. One thing I don't like about Lion, however, is that apps that you just happened to have opened, but weren't really using, open up again on a reboot. I prefer

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-29351835023325992052011-08-11T23:19:00.003+01:002011-08-12T00:12:06.960+01:00

Yes, it's working fine again but I had some unexpected errors/problems/barriers on the way ........ well' I suppose errors are never really expected as if you had expected them, you would do something to prevent them. Anyway, on the way to getting FreeBSD 8.2 to boot to my new Gnome2 Desktop, an error showed up in the verbose output stating myhostname sm-mta[803]: My unqualified host name (

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-1693393574837247792011-08-09T23:30:00.004+01:002011-08-20T11:10:50.866+01:00

Yesterday, I explained that, having failed to recover from the dreaded FreeBSD "portupgrade -a" turmoil, I had given up the ghost and reinstalled FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE from CD and was about the start the port install of Gnome. However, even after a clean install, I couldn't get this to work. First of all, the "make install clean" of /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 errored out when trying to install /

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-69371407776785927022011-08-09T23:13:00.002+01:002011-08-09T23:27:31.875+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted how I resolved the issue of a young lady who was unable to recall her Windows 7 password. Well, the same young person was similarly afflicted today when she just could not, for the life of her, remember her iPhone passcode. Obviously, because of the mobility of the iPhone, an easy way to change the passcode can never be an option. So, you need to hook it up to

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-55168361484886011882011-08-08T23:15:00.004+01:002011-08-09T23:13:42.476+01:00

Over the years, I have used Windows ME, Windows XP, OS X (from Tiger to Lion), Haiku and many Linux distros, particularly Ubuntu. And I never had anything like as many problems as I have experienced in FreeBSD. Now, this is by no means the fault of the OS as, from my experience with the forum, there always is a solution to whatever problem I've come across. Maybe I have to conclude that I'm too

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-2027969383756548662011-08-05T23:41:00.004+01:002011-08-06T00:30:23.832+01:00

Well, I hadn't used FreeBSD for quite a while so I got back to it yesterday.FreeBSD 8.2-Release that I have installed on my Dell E520 booted without problem and everything seemed to work on the Desktop including Compiz 3D effects, AWN, Yakuake and Conky.So, after ascertaining that everything was working fine, I think I sub-consciously went looking for how to mess things up.What better than "

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-49505782171536016822011-08-02T23:43:00.002+01:002011-08-02T23:59:18.324+01:00

Today while using the Google Chrome Canary Build browser in Windows 7 Ultimate on a HP Mini 110-1140 SA I kept getting an error saying "Aw Snap. Something went wrong while displaying this webpage".I got this every time for every page I tried.Reloading, as recommended in the error message, did nothing.Well, seems this is a known error and here's Chrome's wiki page on this error.I tried all of the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-55203822280176906912011-08-02T22:59:00.002+01:002011-08-02T23:40:31.926+01:00

This is a complicated topic that no title can do justice to so let me explain.It started with my moving the root partition of LinuxMint on the EeePC 901 from one partition to another with the help of GParted which I've already reported.After moving the root partition, I ran update-grub from Ubuntu (Ubuntu's Grub2 is in the MBR and I use this to boot everything). However, LinuxMint wouldn't boot

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-45219710163558448322011-07-31T14:54:00.008+01:002011-07-31T22:56:23.703+01:00

Of course, this can only be my personal subjective view, particularly as I have actually only tested a few browsers including OmniWeb, Stainless, Safari, Chrome and Chrome Canary. In particular, I have not looked at Firefox as I really have never liked it.It's main feature, the millions of extensions, just do not excite me.I want a browser essentially just for light browsing and the main features

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-48369940458647542362011-07-29T23:01:00.002+01:002011-07-29T23:47:24.425+01:00

Yes, it does, as long as your machine is 64-bit capable which basically means as long as it's not too old or, more particularly, that you have one of these processors: Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor.My late-2009 MacBook with a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo boots to 64-bit with Lion.To see if you're running on 64 or 32-bit go to the Apple menu (top left)>About This Mac>

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-38894675828270283292011-07-26T23:53:00.002+01:002011-07-27T00:18:48.355+01:00

Yesterday, I posted about how I successfully used Bauer Puntu to recover a "mislaid" Windows 7 user password.In getting the netboot back into operation I activated the Adminstrator account by opening a Command Prompt as Adminstrator and input this commandnet user administrator /active:yesThen, in Control Panel>User Accounts, I set a easy-to-remember password for this account ("admin" -- what else

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-68612339824851139292011-07-25T23:21:00.004+01:002011-07-27T00:21:03.065+01:00

Today I was presented with a problem on a HP Mini 100-1140 SA, with Windows 7 installed.The machine is owned by a young lady whose IT interests stretch little, if at all, beyond Facebook and YouTube.She had recently changed the password of her user account, but had been unable to recall precisely what it was.As she is the only user, the machine became unusable. A quick google introduced me to

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-33743529426751998902011-07-24T23:27:00.001+01:002011-07-25T00:27:42.493+01:00

......and it went smoothly and there's quite a bit to like.I upgraded from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 to Lion 10.7 on my MacBook 6.1 (13-inch late 2009) with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD.These guides describe essentially what I did; the first is quicker to read and this one is more detailed.I paid €23.99 for the upgrade which, at the current €:US$ exchange works out at about 15% higher than the USA

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-91259038092025392342011-07-22T23:24:00.002+01:002011-07-22T23:50:30.835+01:00

As I already posted, the free Mikogo screensharing app impressed was as it was crossplatform and operated from a browser only on the Viewer side.I started a thread in the Mikogo forum because I couldn't get get File Sharing or Chat to work.Well, turns out that to get File Transfer or Chat working you actually have to download the app on the Viewer side too.OK, it's not such a big problem -- as

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-21910803458946122202011-07-20T23:32:00.002+01:002011-07-20T23:53:51.596+01:00

I came across Mikogo in this blog post a few days ago. Here's a review which explains a little more on what it does (actually, there is a Linux version now which I've used).Essentially it does what TeamViewer does but with the advantage that it only needs to be downloaded (but not really installed -- just extracted) on the Presenter machine. On the Viewer computers that just wish to join the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-32905222210067536242011-07-20T14:17:00.005+01:002011-07-20T23:30:10.599+01:00

A few days ago I reported that commenting out the line "LOCKSCREEN=true" in /etc/default/acpi-support" will avoid the screen locking and required password entry to unlock it when the screensaver activates.Well, that's not actually true on my netbook anyway and I have no idea why. I have the impression that the appearance of the locked screen is delayed a little but not by much.I made numerous

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-68642631971697251292011-07-16T23:14:00.002+01:002011-07-17T00:01:01.559+01:00

On Wednesday (14/07/2011), I was alerted to an impending update on Ubuntu 11.04 on my Dell E520.This was quite a large update and included a new kernel image (2.6.38.10-generic) to replace the existing 2.6.38.8-generic.Well, the update went fine, but when I rebooted to the new kernel, the resulting Desktop froze. The clock was stopped and it was impossible open any apps. Nevertheless, the mouse

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-80763941657458243652011-07-12T23:06:00.003+01:002011-07-12T23:39:10.933+01:00

Yes, I've been experimenting with Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha2 on my EeePC 901 netbook for a few days and in general it works well apart from some relatively minor annoyances.However, this morning when I booted to Ocelot, something looked wrong.First, the Unity Panel had changed back to its default status with Firefox, the Libre Office suite as well as Ubuntu One all present, all of which I always

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-56144823841330257772011-07-10T23:30:00.002+01:002011-07-11T00:12:16.672+01:00

I installed Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 2 (Oneiric Ocelot) a couple of days ago on my EeePC 901 and have posted on a few of my observations already both here and here.As I like Conky a lot, I copied over some files from Ubuntu Natty which I have on the same machine (.conkyrc, .conkyForecast.config, gmail_parser.py and conkyip) as well as installing python-feedparser from Ubuntu's repos.After this

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-30806083404877125662011-07-08T23:51:00.002+01:002011-07-09T00:15:55.827+01:00

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had installed Oneiric Ocelot (Ubuntu 11.10) Alpha 2 and, while it worked very well (for an alpha), it didn't seem to have either Login Screen or Startup Applications apps.However, as is normal in Linux, if there's no GUI, just use the CLI.Note that Ocelot uses the LightDM manager to login.Although the post in this link explains (in one of the comments) how to

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-91908018903612838752011-07-07T23:15:00.004+01:002011-07-08T00:03:00.609+01:00

The alpha 2 of the next version of Ubuntu, which is 11.10, is now available for download.Here's a review.I downloaded it, made a Live USB and installed it on my EeePC 901.Well, it works very well given it's in an alpha state. A couple of errors appear on bootup, including "/run/udev not writable" but no action is required and it goes right on booting.At the login screen, I chose the Gnome session

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-55806248613710622362011-07-05T23:23:00.002+01:002011-07-05T23:47:26.205+01:00

Although I've been using Haiku (and earlier Senryu) for some years, only today, when I saw this thread in the Haiku forum, did I come across the very useful Stack and Tile (SAT) desktop feature in Haiku.It's been around for some time but has only been included in the OS since R1A3.Essentially, it offers a couple of very tidy solutions to handling multiple open windows on the Haiku Desktop.This

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-44158982787833427942011-07-03T23:18:00.002+01:002011-07-03T23:39:18.269+01:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I installed LinuxMint11 to a 16GB usb-key with Grub2 in the mbr and it worked very well, other than being noticeably slower than would be expected for operation from a HDD (or ssd).Just for curiosity, I created some further partitions on the key and then installed Ubuntu 11.04 (/ and /home) as well as Haiku R1A3 (all of these three partitions were logicals.Running

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-71805936974687704572011-06-30T23:09:00.003+01:002011-06-30T23:40:00.472+01:00

Yes, I've given up on this as there's just no promising signs at all.OS X booted from my 10-year-old 160 GB HDD works fine on my EeePC 901. I suppose a slightly faster operating speed might result from a more modern external drive, but do I really need it?I don't think so as I really just embarked on this to see if it was possible.Today, I tried to install OS X directly onto my new 16 GB key

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-54381947042013079972011-06-29T22:55:00.002+01:002011-06-30T00:08:36.269+01:00

As I posted yesterday, this looked as if it might be made to work if only I could get its speed of operation up to what it is when I boot Snow Leopard from a external drive.This will also serve as a test for how well OS X might perform in a multiboot system if installed directly onto the larger ssd.Yesterday, I considered the possibility that the slowness of my 8GB usb key may have been due to

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-75114504397500846132011-06-28T22:49:00.002+01:002011-06-28T23:28:51.147+01:00

Well, it's not exactly what I was looking for when I started this project, but it's not far off.Yesterday, it looked like I had come to a very serious barrier but, today, I tried to copy what I already had installed, and optimized according to this guide, on a small and very old external HDD.This time, however, I wanted to install it to a USB key (HP 8 MB) which would avoid me having to mess up

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-53921677181036160812011-06-27T23:21:00.002+01:002011-06-28T00:24:21.019+01:00

Yes, this is starting to look more complicated.Because GParted had some difficulty dealing with the new partition to which I "restored" the GUID partition to which I installed Snow Leopard on the Philips External HD, I reinstalled it to the external but this time I used a MBR partition scheme.Just to mention that once I had "restored" the GUID partition to the MBR partition scheme on the EeePC,

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-82804394456253413642011-06-27T22:55:00.002+01:002011-06-27T23:21:12.174+01:00

I've been happily using my netbook with the 1GB, that came with it, for three years.Today I finally went ahead and installed a 2GB stick (200Pin, DDR2 SODIMM 256MX64 PC2 5300 from Crucial, €25 incl Delivery).Installation was very simple and took less than a minute.It's important to push the stick into place until the clips at each side, which you need to open to get the installed stick out, both

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-62672942037728978252011-06-26T22:43:00.003+01:002011-06-27T23:30:52.884+01:00

Well, I knew this would take some time but I think there's some light at the end of the tunnel.As I posted a few days ago, I'm using this guide to install Snow Leopard on my EeePC 901.What I've done is little more than to follow the guide and install OS X 10.6.1 on my very old Philips 160 GB External HD which has lain dormant for many years.Now I have actually got a legitimate Snow Leopard

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-17111073165050793152011-06-24T23:35:00.002+01:002011-06-25T00:17:39.969+01:00

Yes, that's right. I going to try to get Snow Leopard operating on my resurrected netbook.My intention is to use a combination of this guide as well as this Lifehacker post.Of course, I can't forget that I actually installed OS X on a Dell Dim 9200 last year and posted about it here.Now, the first thing I needed to do was create a new primary partition of 6.5 GB in size, not so easy as it sounds

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-52391813477509030112011-06-23T22:53:00.002+01:002011-06-23T23:18:30.102+01:00

So, far I've installed Haiku R1A3 in thee different partitions on my newly rejuvenated EeePC 901.In the case of two of the installs, the space taken up by the OS was way above the 700-800 MB I expected. Indeed, it was about 2GB in excess which, when you only have 20 GB in total on this machine, is not to be sniffed at.Now I'd come across a similar problem before which I posted about here.The

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-68535902061682895352011-06-21T23:21:00.003+01:002011-06-22T00:12:54.199+01:00

When setting up my large ssd on the EeePC 901 (16 GB), I installed two OSes with each of them having / and /home partitions. So, that makes four partitions, right?Well, no problem if you never want any more partitions. But if you do, you've already used up all of the available primary partitions.As I did, I needed to delete one primary, create an extended partition and however many logical

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-86314672613601212092011-06-21T23:07:00.003+01:002011-06-21T23:21:22.973+01:00

I just couldn't wait.Although this little machine was working very close to perfectly, I went ahead and installed the new keyboard that I bought off E-bay for €14.The install was very easy and took less than 5 minutes. Although I initially had great difficulty in getting the keyboard off, I've learned that you don't need to be super-careful as there's very little to break underneath.Probably the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-23572811468293798552011-06-21T09:11:00.003+01:002011-06-21T14:35:23.593+01:00

Might seem like I'm continually bleating on about the miraculous recovery I'm seeing in my netbook, but I am truly amazed.Just a week ago, I posted what I thought was the death knell of this machine.At it's worst, Grub seemed to be totally messed up and I could not boot to any of the four OSes I had on the ssd's.In addition, a USB key with Ubuntu would not boot but gave, in addition to very many

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-11304980437131676162011-06-18T23:09:00.002+01:002011-06-19T00:24:45.605+01:00

If ever I get a serious illness, I just hope I can experience something similar to the spectacular recovery I saw this week in my netbook.Just a few days ago, I was almost sure its time had come.Now, I have Grub2 as the bootloader booting Haiku, Ubuntu 11.04 and LinuxMint 11 and everything is working almost normally.Even the incidence of non-functioning keyboard and touchpad has become very, very

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-29783742391052696772011-06-17T23:01:00.002+01:002011-06-18T00:16:12.131+01:00

Right now, Haiku continues to work well. The keyboard works after most boots. If it doesn't I just reboot until it does.Additionally, I updated the BIOS which seemed to bring some improvements although I can't be certain of this. Nevertheless, things certainly aren't worse.Further, I managed to install Ubuntu 11.04 on the /dev/sdb 16 GB ssd but haven't yet managed to get it to boot.Here's some

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-2642632500420190532011-06-15T22:55:00.005+01:002011-06-16T00:30:20.671+01:00

Yesterday, I posted about my netbook's near-death experience.Today, I used Parted Magic to delete all partitions on both ssd's and then installed Haiku (nightly r42125) on the 4GB disk and this went smoothly.In addition, it added a boot sector to /dev/sda1 (rather than the mbr) which allowed it to boot as no other OS was present.Booting went fine and the BIOS pages did not show up.However, just

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-6299128966641614072011-06-14T23:24:00.002+01:002011-06-15T00:07:59.436+01:00

A while ago I reported a keyboard problem in my EeePC 901 which miraculously cured itself without me having done anything.After this I was able to get it set up to work extremely well and this blissful condition persevered for nearly three months.Then about a week ago, strange symbols started appearing when typing in Ubuntu 11.04 (such as ^[[[B) and when booting (the most common during boot was

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-34477309719799192112011-06-13T23:00:00.003+01:002011-06-13T23:43:18.626+01:00

My Dell E520 has an nVidia GeForce 7300 LE graphics card.I rarely, if ever, use Windows XP so I don't particularly keep it in tip-top condition.Nevertheless, when I did a bit of fiddling around a few days ago, I noticed that the video driver seemed a little old. To find what driver you have right-click on the My Computer icon (on the Desktop or in the Start menu), choose Manage and then Device

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-21696501355132218702011-06-11T23:09:00.002+01:002011-06-12T00:11:12.332+01:00

Nine years ago, when I bought a Dell Dimension 4550, along with it I got an Epson Perfection 1260 scanner as I was sure it was something I was going to use a lot.Truth be told, in the intervening years, I've hardly every used it and I think the last time was, at least, two years ago.But this week, a need arose so I had to brush up on how to use it.In Ubuntu 11.04, I used Xsane Image Scanning

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-72574216176523334212011-06-09T23:57:00.002+01:002011-06-10T00:25:42.776+01:00

I have always thought that desktop icons with a block of color behind the text looks ugly. So, I have always used a transparent block behind the text.To achieve this in Windows XP never required anything more than ensuing that the "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop" is checked in Control Panel>System>Advanced Tab>Settings button in Performance section>Visual Effects tab.However, a

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-91391233661701943832011-06-09T23:25:00.003+01:002011-06-09T23:41:38.802+01:00

This is a follow-up to my post of two years ago on how to get the above symbols in Ubuntu and OS X.First, you must make sure that NumLock is activated for the number pad at the right side of your keyboard.Then, hold down the Alt key (left alt) and hit the following key sequence on the number pad:€ = Alt 0128º = Alt 0176The symbols will appear when you release the Alt key.They work equally well in

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-54613950903019261812011-06-07T22:58:00.004+01:002011-06-07T23:50:36.459+01:00

Yesterday I posted that I was able to get the Unity (3D) session working well in Ubuntu Natty by using a legacy driver for my nVidia GeForce 7300 LE graphics card. However, today I installed an upgraded version of Emerald using this guide as the repo version of Emerald gave a segfault as I reported earlier for LinuxMint.The procedure involves using the commandssudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-44464058165200685532011-06-06T23:11:00.003+01:002011-06-06T23:56:29.787+01:00

I've been using Ubuntu 11.04 on my Dell E520 with Unity-2D for some time simply because choosing the Unity session at login, although it did provide a visible Desktop, it was completely non-functional.I attributed this to an incompatibility of the 3D driver for the nVidia-GeForce-7300 LE card but never looked any further............until today.A little googling confirmed that there is a problem

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-36912973338086054432011-06-01T23:07:00.002+01:002011-06-01T23:38:39.056+01:00

That title may well be difficult to understand, and therefore attract no readers, unless you've been involved in similar problems in upgrading ZevenOS 3.0 to Natty Narwhal.These earlier posts explain where I'm coming from.Additionally, this forum thread provides most of the details.Now, as the screenshot shows, ZevenOS after upgrading to Natty, looks very much like Haiku while maintaining the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-91964786554235434992011-05-29T22:45:00.005+01:002011-05-29T23:44:03.536+01:00

I've had LinuxMint LXDE 10 installed on my little EeePC 901 for some time but, quite honestly, I rarely used it.Part of the reason for this is that LinuxMint never appeared anymore to me than Ubuntu in a different color although it does have some differences but, in my view, nothing noteworthy.In addition, I didn't see anything in LXDE that I liked.Anyway, a few days ago Katya became available so

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-54436102256388221982011-05-27T23:42:00.002+01:002011-05-27T23:55:17.690+01:00

As I show in the screenshot in this post, I had Conky working fine in Ubuntu 11.04 including weather conditions.However, the last couple of days, after I had done a routine Ubuntu upgrade, the weather section no longer showed up.The problem was that this line in .conkyrc${execpi 1800 conkyForecast --location=ABCDEFGH --template=/usr/share/conkyforecast/example/conkyForecast.template}refers to a

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-75177166743203226262011-05-26T22:56:00.003+01:002011-05-26T23:26:33.702+01:00

This is a follow-up to my earlier post on the same topic now that I've found how to upgrade so that the Unity (2D only) launcher appears on the left side of the screen while all windows have Haiku decoration.The procedure is:1. Use the Upgrade to Natty Narwahl popup to do the upgrade (very long -- mine took nearly 7 hours)2. After the upgrade is complete, go to Synaptic Package Manager>Settings>

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-25627515392129632012011-05-24T23:30:00.002+01:002011-05-24T23:42:42.842+01:00

I had ZevenOS 3.0 working fine on my EeePC901 with compiz, AWN and Conky all performing perfectly.But every time I booted to ZevenOS, I got a message inviting me to upgrade to Natty Narwhal. Of course, I can never resist such inducements so I finally succumbed and did the upgrade which took close to 7 hours.Even though I have Ubuntu Natty working absolutely fine on the very same machine, the

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-77937085056879906702011-05-14T01:48:00.002+01:002011-05-14T02:07:42.421+01:00

This is mysterious and I have no explanation.But, yesterday the internet was down and Conky apparently did not launch at boot in either Ubuntu 1.04, ZevenOS 3.0 or LinuxMint 10.0 on my EeePC 901.In Ubuntu, conky seemed to be running according to the output from the command "ps -e | grep conky".As soon as the internet was restored, Conky started on boot in all three OSes.But why should lack of an

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-63611944875507004322011-05-12T02:13:00.000+01:002011-05-13T21:25:30.050+01:00

Yes, here in Brazil, the number of computers at my disposal is much reduced and I was using my EeePC 901 to charge my iPad1.When I first tried this I was somewhat shocked to find that the charging icon in the top-right corner of the iPad said Not Charging.Now a little googling quickly convinced that it actually is still charging although at a lower rate. For me, leaving my iPad "Not Charging"

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-6373872034986052792011-05-02T23:08:00.002+01:002011-05-02T23:23:32.558+01:00

Yes, this is a very meagre post, actually, it's almost embarrassing. But, it really did cause me some problems and I felt some satisfaction when I finally found the astonishingly easy solution.I usually use Haiku on my Dell E520 desktop although I also have it on my EeePC.So, yesterday, when I booted to Haiku on the netbook, I noticed that I had more than 500 unread emails.Actually, it seems that

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-63995424386174821502011-04-30T23:32:00.008+01:002011-05-01T13:38:28.935+01:00

Today I tried to copy a file from my Mac to Haiku on my Dell E520.The command I used on the Mac was simplyscp some.file user@192.168.1.16:DesktopHowever, this produced this error message@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!Someone could be

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-55557565458780335242011-04-29T23:16:00.002+01:002011-04-30T00:01:08.299+01:00

I work with quite a few computers, all on the same LAN, and often find a need to copy music (or whatever other files) from one machine to another.The traditional way to do this is with scp which means running this command in the client computer:scp -r username@192.168.x.y:/path/to/folder/on/server/ /path/to/receiving/folder/on/client/where 192.168.x.y is the IP address of the server.You can issue

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-30398327089089211902011-04-27T23:35:00.002+01:002011-04-28T00:11:54.323+01:00

All OSes have a means for finding stuff such as files or names or whatever.However, that in the Haiku OS is very, very fast and thorough. I use it a lot.So, as I mentioned yesterday, I wanted a keyboard shortcut to bring up the Find pop-up window fast.I got some good tips from this thread which completely solved this issue for me.The first comes from Haiku's Preferences > Shortcuts. Just assign a

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-38122470434243294372011-04-26T23:50:00.003+01:002011-04-27T00:21:10.264+01:00

In browsing through the Haiku forums I came across two useful functions I hadn't used before.The first is QuickLaunch which is available from Haikuware.QuickLaunch allows quick selection and launch of a range of apps. You start by typing the name of the required app in the QuickLaunch window whereupon a range of possible apps will be created. So, just by picking the app as soon as it appears

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-23886111723857676512011-04-26T23:27:00.002+01:002011-04-26T23:48:45.481+01:00

Lately, I've been looking a lot at the temperatures inside my various computers and what influences them.I was surprised to find that removing what looked like a minimal amount of dust from my Dell E520 reduced both CPU and GPU temperatures by about 10ºC.So, today, I took the plastic bottom off my unibody MacBook 6,1 (eight small screws requiring a Philips #00 screwdriver. A set of six very small

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-46394249352945955902011-04-25T23:22:00.005+01:002011-04-26T00:22:03.171+01:00

With Linux there are two important assumptions with regard to the command line. First is to never conclude that you know everything.Secondly, never assume that what you want to do can't be done.Today I wanted to include two small parts from the output from the "sensors" command in Ubuntu 11.04 on my EeePC 901.The whole output was as follows:acpitz-virtual-0Adapter: Virtual devicetemp1: +

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-1888948218147448792011-04-24T23:18:00.003+01:002011-04-25T00:04:34.768+01:00

I mentioned some time ago that my Grub2 boot menu page was of very poor quality after upgrading to Ubuntu Natty. The background image looked of very low resolution and the fonts, although large enough, were difficult to read because of being somewhat transparent.Strangely, I did not have this problem when I upgraded Ubuntu to Natty on my other Dell (Dim9200) where the boot menu background was as

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-49326897752999451692011-04-23T23:41:00.002+01:002011-04-24T00:07:19.766+01:00

Having set up macros to easily switch from one keyboard layout to another, I wanted to get some distinctive icons that I could include in the LaunchBox dock.Haiku boasts a nice app to create your own vector icons, which are the only type supported by Haiku, called icon-o-matic.There's a thorough user guide as well as a short video-tutorial which I used.However, I found icon-o-matic difficult to

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-35050746621650049272011-04-23T23:17:00.002+01:002011-04-23T23:40:09.384+01:00

My Dell 520 is operating very well in multiboot mode with FreeBSD 8.2, Windows XP, Ubuntu 11.04, Haiku R1A2 and Haiku Nightly 41270. I sue Grub1.99 from Ubuntu in the MBR to boot everything.But this morning I got a scare.Although it booted fine first thing today, when I went to reboot to switch from one OS to another, I got a Grub Error:Grub Loading, please waitError 22Error 22 means "Must load

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-52887747347128135262011-04-22T23:39:00.003+01:002011-04-23T00:21:06.178+01:00

All of the other OSes that I use have a panel icon for one-click changing of keyboard layouts (I type in both English and Brazilian Portuguese).However, this is not available in Haiku.Instead you need to go to Deskbar Leaf > Preferences > Keymap and then, in the left hand listing of available layouts, choose the one you want.To make this change less cumbersome I created small scripts which I

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-60164514309128408982011-04-21T23:34:00.002+01:002011-04-22T00:05:44.508+01:00

I like to update my install of Haiku Nightly on the Dell E520. As my current version is about a month old, I downloaded Haiku r41270 gcc2-hybrid on the Haiku R1A2 partition I have on the same machine and tried to install to the smaller partition reserved for Haiku Nightly.However, what's normally a very simple job of no more than 15 minutes duration turned into a nightmare -- alright that's an

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-35342455319223534042011-04-20T23:29:00.005+01:002011-04-21T00:30:11.225+01:00

In recent days (see here and here), thanks to Conky, I've been regaling myself with the wonders of CPU and GPU temperature variations and control.I've done this in a number of OSes (Linux and FreeBSD) and on a number of computers (two Desktops and a netbook) but, up to now, have not looked at what is my workhorse machine -- my MacBook 6.1 with Intel Core2Duo 2.26 GHz processor and nVidia GeForce

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-88938146807866256662011-04-19T23:09:00.002+01:002011-04-20T00:26:11.809+01:00

Yesterday, after revealing my concerns about high CPU operating temperatures, I considered opening up the computer and removing any dust in an attempt to get the processor temperatures down.So, today I opened up my Dell E520 and was surprised to find very little visible dust inside even though it's been about a year since I last took off the cover.The gridded air inlet at the front of the box was

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-22292724708782374702011-04-18T23:05:00.003+01:002011-04-19T00:29:42.467+01:00

I've been using powerd in FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE for a little more than 24 hours and have learned a lot. I posted about this installation yesterday.First, ever since I got Conky up and running in FreeBSD, I've seen that at full load my CPU (Intel Core2Duo 6300 1.87 GHz) runs at 63-66ºC.Now, according to information available in many posts and articles, including this, the maximum (or "critical")

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3231728482379970588.post-23847341821604687982011-04-17T23:39:00.008+01:002011-04-18T23:00:51.586+01:00

I've already posted about how easy this is to set up in Ubuntu using indicator-cpufreq.The principal, if not the only, benefit from this is reduced power consumption which is useful when running on battery power. A further benefit is reduced processor temperature which "may" prolong processor life.I learned about this first when I saw this tutorial, this one and this too.Both of these are,

PaulFXHnoreply@blogger.com0