Kopete Does Everything, Even Google Talk

Here are instructions on how to add you Gmail google talk account into Kopete. Yes it's awesome.

Kopete: Access Google Talk

Thanks to Tech-Recipes for this awesome little HowTo.

Powered by ScribeFire.

New OpenSUSE 10.3 Desktop

My Firefox Add-ons

Here they are:

Adblock Plus
Download Statusbar
DownloadThemAll!
Errorzilla
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
NoScript
Restart Firefox (Essential when trying new themes) QuickRestart (Even better - has a alt key hotkey)
RSS Ticker
Tab Effect (I don't use this one regularly, but it is a cool touch [fake Xgl])
ScribeFire (Blog editor inside Firefox)

Most Recently Updated (Thank You Honeys)

Gmail Notifier

Enjoy!

Media in OpenSuSE 10.2

Awesome how to:

http://suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=36351

Peace.

Boot Windows On Transonic 3002

***Before you start make sure you download ActiveSync from Microsoft to connect to your GPS***

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/activesync/activesync45.mspx

Thanks to user goodgrr on GpsPassion Forums these instructions say exactly how to boot to Windows CE on your Transonic 3002 (and run an mp3 player which is pre-installed):

Here's how to unlock it so you can use the Windows functions and below that instructions on putting POIWarner onto it and getting speed camera data loaded onto that. Thanks to gpspassion for the original starting point as well as Sol Puerto for further help it getting the right files in the right place and the majority of these instructions.

Download the instalation pack files to your PC
http://www.gpspassion.com/download/custom150e.zip

Connect the device to your PC via active synch.

1 Move to the folder called \Mnav
2 Rename the mnavdce.exe to mnavdce_old.exe
3 Copy "regedit.exe" from the .zip file and paste into the \Mnav and rename it "mnavdce.exe
4 Copy "modified.reg" into the "Mnav" folder on the device
5 Soft reset your device
6 When the device reboots it will automatically launch Regedit. Click "File | Import" and then locate the "Mnav" folder in the files and folders selection list and double click to open. You will see the "modified.reg" file copied in step 4, double click to import.
7 Delete the renamed "regedit.exe (e.g. mnavedce.exe) in \mnav (or rename it)
8 Rename the "mnavdce_old.exe" back to "mnavdce.exe
9 Copy "showtaskbar.exe" from the .zip file and paste into \Windows\Startup
10 Locate "explore.exe" in the \windows folder, right click and select "Create Shortcut". Cut the "Shortcut to Explore.Exe" file that is created as a result and paste into \Windows\Desktop. Repeat this process for "MNAVDECE.exe located in the "Mnav" folder and "MP3Player.exe" located in \Windows

Finally reset your device once more with the stylus and it will boot to the WinCE desktop with shortcuts to the three applications you had before

Sway Bar Links

Okay so, there was an extremely annoying clank every time I drove over rough road and I had no idea what it was. Thanks to James we narrowed it down to the Sway Bar Links or the Control Arms. Since the Sway Bar Links only cost $36 and the Control Arms are like $150 we tried the links first. These are the pics of the old ones. Not only were they going bad the threads were also rusted as hell (they're 12 years old). I finally got to the point where I had the hack saw them off. The first one was extremely hard -- the nut barely turned and I was killing myself on it. Oh oh, also there were no lifts open so I did all of this on jack stands. Once I finally had enough room to hack saw it - I did. The second one was a tiny bit easier because one of the guys in the shop had some liquid wrench. However even after soaking it for like 10 minutes (I didn't wait very long because I was paying for stall time)I was able to unscrew it almost all the way. It finally got stuck at the very end and I had to hack saw it also. I should mention that I also took off a lot of the rust with a steel brush on the second one but in the end there was just too much.

So to make a long story short, the new ones are on and here are the old ones. Note how mangled they are and the extreme amount of rust on the end/nut. But most importantly the car no longer clunks on rough roads!!!





This one almost made it, but alas no.


This is the area with two flat sides in order to keep is stationary while taking the nut off. I sure showed that thing...

(DIGIT MACRO ROCKS!)

Alright alright... I climbed back under the car and here are the new ones installed...

Even Microsoft's mice are stupid!

For some reason the forward and back buttons on my Microsoft Intellimouse don't automatically work with my OpenSuSE 10.2 distro. So all you do to fix this is:

edit /etc/X11/XF86Config

and add a line under this section:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Name" "Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical"
Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
Option "Vendor" "Sysp"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7" #ADD THIS LINE
EndSection


Also, just as a small side note. Be sure to save a backup of XF86Config before making any changes so you don't mess something up and have to reinstall your OS (speaking from personal experience).

And I bid you all - a good day.

WiFi Antenna

Here it is, our awesome new cantenna:














Thank you very much to my Father-in-law who perfectly crafted this for us. It works beautifully!!!

imagemagick Script

Save this as a .sh file then run with bash to create a crapload of thumbnails out of your photos.

for file in *.jpg
do
convert -resize 400 "$file" thumb_"$file"
done


Fanks!

Making NASlite and Mac OS X 10.4 play nice...

Because NASlite does not use password encryption on your files you need to
tell you Mac that everything will be okay with a little nsmb.conf file:

sudo vi /etc/nsmb.conf (NOTE! not smb.conf)

[default]
minauth=none

save the file ( :wq in vi)

Thanks to the guys from serverelements (the people who make naslite for the solution).

NOTE! This does however pose a security risk...

Wireless on OpenSuSE 10.2 with Broadcom

Once again fighting the good fight and trying to get this chipset to work properly with OpenSuSE 10.2.

As always thanks to this skittle loving guy's website: http://nextgen.no-ip.org/~andrew/linux/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapperinfo-gui.php for not only explaining the process but having an explanation that was even specific to OpenSuSE 10.x (and in my case 10.2).

In addition to his instructions I would add not to use ndisgtk, just run the commands manually (as superuser of course):
'ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf'
'modprobe ndiswrapper'
And furthermore I took these steps to not only ensure a working card, but also have it accurately show link/signal quality and load at boot:
edit /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper and add change 'wlan0' to 'eth1'
and
edit /etc/init.d/network adding 'modprobe ndiswrapper' somewhere in the beginning

**Added 14Aug07*** Make sure to configure the wireless device in YaST. Do not use the pre-configured card, make a new wireless device.

I will also mention that when I list installed ndiswrapped windows drivers I do get this annoying output: ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5a : driver installed
device (14E4:4318) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)

However as far I as can tell it seems to make no difference what-so-ever. In addition, I tried to correct this output by blacklisting 'bcm43xx' to which my computer said it was then 'ignoring blacklist rule bcm43xx' or something that effect. So whatever.

Do I absolutely now how what I did affected my computer? Absolutely not. Does my wireless start at boot and work with accurate link/signal quality? Yes.

FUSE/NTFS-3G

Alright. Very annoying thing about linux: will not just mount a USB Hard Drive (Large External Drive) with read/write permissions. That is because the volume is most likely NTFS and you need NTFS-3g and FUSE in order to have read/write permissions on and NTFS drive in linux (or at least OpenSuSE 10.2). Here's a good link to help with that whole process:

http://forum.ntfs-3g.org/viewtopic.php?t=21

Other Helpful Sites:

Just random links for initial setup of this OS. ***DO NOT UPDATE ALL PACKAGES***. Learned that one the hard way, but just for future reference there is the link anyways.

Updating All OpenSuSE 10.2 packages: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16592.html

Setting up OpenSuSE 10.2 Initially: http://www.suseblog.com/?p=171

WRT54G V5

I have the above named router. It sucks. Everyone was like "this is an awesome router!" - yeah if you have versions 1-4. Fortunately I did find Linux based firmware that can be installed in it's puny 2MB of memory (vs. the 4MB in the previous versions). Unfortunately I can't use it as a wireless repeater because the micro version of the Linux firmware doesn't include that capability. Still good stuff - I highly recommend it over the stock firmware.

DD-WRT Micro

Much thanks to this guy's page for an awesome walk-through of the process...

Well until next time...

OpenSUSE 10.2 - Mounting a CIFS Share on Boot

#*** Updated 13SEP2007 ***

//192.168.2.176/Disk-1 /mnt/Storage smbfs password=,fmask=770,dmask=770,gid=admin 0 0

I added the fmask and dmask (fmask for files, dmask for directories) to specify read/write permissions for the files and directories on the server share (only for owner and group, not guest). Also I specified a group id (gid) as admin which combined with the fmask/dmask gives any user in the admin group (as well as root, of course) read/write permissions to the server share. Damn that took a long time to figure out!

#End of update

Right when I thought I had tried everything I did something very simple to fix my enormously annoying boot-time fiasco. I had edited my /etc/fstab and put the following entry:

//192.168.15.5/Disk-1 /home/andrew/Storage cifs auto,password=,user,rw 0 0

Now according to everyone on the internet that I was able to find - this command in /etc/fstab should make my server share mount locally at boot. NOT. I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. It's been driving me nuts for weeks and I've tried everything everyone suggested.

Oh, let me also mention I knew my fstab entry was correct because whenever I ran sudo mount -a after boot-time it mounted just fine.

So then from what I read I came to the conclusion that my OpenSUSE machine was not connecting the my home network at boot - why could this be? Then I noticed that when it did boot into KDE it took a second to use the DHCP server to get an IP. So then I had this genius idea: give it a static IP address.

SO I DID!!! AND IT FIXED THE BLOODY PROBLEM!!!

Make sure if you're doing this to fix your problem you also set the default gateway or else you'll get no network connectivity. Phwew!!! Finally the battle is over!

Synergy - Virtual KVM

I was trying out a little thing I found on suseblog.... and this thing is really sweet. It's a virtual/software KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) share package. Basically it connects all your monitors together so you can use one mouse & keyboard for them all! It rocks! I installed the server portion on my XP machine and it was very self-explanatory, but the client setup on ubuntu is a little tricky if you want it to start at boot-time. Here are the instructions I followed to success from the wonderful people on the Ubuntu Community Forum. Enjoy!

Insti First Cup of Ubuntu

Join Date: Apr 2006 Beans: 4 Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 User

Starting the Synergy CLIENT on boot up.

---

Quote:

Originally Posted by nwgray Admitted serious Linux noob here. What syntax would I use if I wanted to start the client and not the server (synergyc)? I run an XP and Ubuntu box side by side and it is working great. I just need synergyc to start automatically.

These instructions should work for running the synergy client on your UBUNTU machine to connect to a locally networked computer running the synergy server. (I've not actually tried them myself.)
Let us know how you get on.

NOTE:
The

will probably be an ip address that looks something like 192.168.0.1 (DON'T put in the exact string

)

To make the client run when gdm runs, but before anyone has logged in:

edit /etc/gdm/Init/Default:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/gdm/Init/Default

Added the following lines in the middle of the file BEFORE the "sysmodmap=/etc/X11/Xmodmap" line:

Code:

SYNERGYC=`gdmwhich synergyc`
if [ x$SYNERGYC != x ] ; then
     $SYNERGYC 

fi

The only problem with that is once you log in it kills off the client, so you need to make it start again for you.

edited /etc/gdm/Init/Default:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default

Added the following lines in the middle of the file BEFORE the "XSETROOT=`gdmwhich xsetroot`" line:

Code:

SYNERGYC=`gdmwhich synergyc`
if [ x$SYNERGYC != x ] ; then
     $SYNERGYC 

fi

Log out and back in again.

The synergy client should now startup and run whenever your gdm session does.

NOTE:
The

will probably be an ip address that looks something like 192.168.0.1 (DON'T put in the exact string

)

Then follow up with:

MasterZ 5 Cups of Ubuntu

Join Date: Mar 2006 Beans: 30

Re: synergy / boot up

---

Hahaaa

You found it !

The file "/etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default" did not have execute permissions.

I wonder if it is a bug or not, because "/etc/X11/gdm/PreSession/Default" has execute permissions. (It is a fresh install so I did not modify anything yet, except running automatrix).

Anyway for the persons who still have the same problem, just do

Code:

sudo chmod +x /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default

and it should be ok.

Thanks again Insti !

Correction...

On my last post I mentioned how quote "Linux working = No money for MS". Due to recent news I should now post a correction.

Because the machine I was posting about is using OpenSUSE (by Novell) and Novell was just bought out by Microsoft then my logic no longer stands.

Let's now go with: Non-Novell Distro's of Linux working = No money for MS.

Thanks to Eric for his copy of The Wall Street Journal's article publicizing the whole event.

Did I mention I was only like 4 or 5 months late on this story?

WTF.

Seriously, WTF?

I decided to try using ndiswrapper to get my wireless working on my openSUSE 10.2 machine. Pain in the ...

It works, but for some god-forsaken reason it thinks the wireless card is an ethernet card and shows it as eth1 vs. wlan0.

To install the driver and use ndiswrapper I followed this gents page. Very nice page, excellent info, but it doesn't say one thing about having to reboot your computer to have it recognize your wireless card (which of course is true in my case). You should be able to just modprobe ndiswrapper as far as I understand. WTF. Then I followed some other helpful fellow's instructions on using bcm43xx-fwcutter in order to get my Broadcom wireless card to show up as wlan0 -- no dice. I even blacklisted bcm43xx in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (I think that's it) as another gent had mentioned still to no avail!

OpenSUSE vs. Broadcom -- Broadcom wins. OpenSUSE got in some excellent blows by being able to actually connect to the net, but Broadcom dominated the battle by never submitting to wlan0. Hope you didn't have money riding on that fight.

Whatever...

I'm so tired of screwing with it that as long as I have wireless I don't care. As far as I'm concerned I win.

The transitive property: a=b=c so a=c. My version:

Linux working = Not using MS Windows which = MS doesn't get my Money
so...
Linux working = No money for MS

Hooray for Linux. Job well done.

The Beginning

What a horrible beginning. I just wrote a novel and as I was editing - more specifically deleting a jpeg off the post - as all of it was destroyed. Oh cruel world.