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.