moving parts of the kasper clan

Okay, seriously, I think we could just delete 90% of the firefox themes on addons.mozilla.org. Truly, I am almost physically ill after spending a few minutes looking through them.   And the ones I’ve found on deviantart are out of date and unusable.  Surely, there must be a top-secret repository of really good Firefox 2 themes somewhere, right?  Certainly this can’t be all that there is?

Bah humbug.

You know what?  I think I’d even consider paying some small amount of $cash for something truly beautiful and groundbreaking.

Dear Lazyweb,

I would LOVE to have bling on my desktop. I use KDE3, and have been good all year. I think I should be allowed to have bling on my desktop just like all of my GNOME friends.

To this end, I’ve tried running compiz with emerald in my KDE desktop. I can get both compiz and emerald running just nicely and get it all configured the way that I like it. But then whenever I restart X and compiz comes back, it manages to forget half of my keybindings and configuration settings. I don’t think I’m doing anything weird or revolutionary in my settings–just an 8-sided cube with viewport-switching keybindings, ring switching, scale niftiness, animations and other standard-looking stuff.

But for the life of me, I cannot figure out why compiz just manages to forget half of its configuration between restarts. I’m using “ccsm” to configure stuff and for the most part it seems to work just fine (i.e. compiz seems to honor the settings as I’m configuring them). Any idea on what I’m doing wrong? Or is it because I’m using compiz + emerald + KDE? Does anyone in KDE3 desktop land have successful bling with compiz?

In case anyone else hits this…. In one of the more recent releases of our beloved KDE, code was added to more smoothly integrate with networking. Namely, the attempt is now made to be aware of NetworkManager-initiated network connections, as well as know when NetworkManager doesn’t think it’s connected so as to not keep trying network activities when there might not be a network connection. Excellent idea, honestly.

However (you knew there was one), I have a love/hate relationship with NetworkManager and knetworkmanager. When they work, they work great. When they don’t it’s supremely irritating. Case in point: I’m at a friend’s house. He’s using standard WEP and a non-broadcasted ESSID. I tried all manners of asking NetworkManager nicely for a good 10 minutes to join the network to no avail. In the next 30 seconds, I manually iwconfig’d, ifconfig’d, and dhclient’d my way onto the network and things are working swimmingly. Almost. You see, with the changes we made (see paragraph #1), now KMail and Konqueror, etc., think that I don’t have a network connection because NetworkManager told them I don’t. However, I’ve discovered that I can coax KMail, Konqi, and friends to try using the network connection that I really do have (honestly!) but NetworkManager couldn’t provide for me by doing this on the CLI:

dcop kded networkstatus setNetworkStatus NMNetwork 0

It’s hack, but it seems to do the trick for the time being. I’ll hunt Will down later and ask him how to do this properly…

[UPDATE:]  I caught Will and here’s the real skinny:

Either extend your manual connection script to register a fake network with kded that is online, or shoot the networkstatus system down by disabling it in kcmshell kcmkded.  You can also unregister NMNetwork; the system should be fail-safe.  Or not run knetworkmanager.  The system figures the best connection status, so you can also register your own network.  0 is ‘no information’, 6 is offline, 8 is online in the status enums.

Will rocks, btw.  =;)

This, the next exciting story in my Adventures With the Thinkpad T61 At Work (TM)  =;)…. So I got a really sweet-looking IOGEAR 4-port USB KVM Switch at work. But when I plugged it into the T61, although the nVidia driver was able to find the external display (auto-detect button thingey), it only gave me 2 options for resolution, the larger of which was 640×480, which obviously is rubbish. So I stumbled across this helpful ubuntu page which gave me the clue I needed:

It would seem that xorg cannot detect the possible resolutions when using the “nvidia” driver. For me, the only resolution I could use was my LCD’s native resolution (1680×1050).

Here’s how you fix this:

1) Make a backup of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf as shown in the previous examples

2) Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf as shown in the previous examples

3) Add the following line to your existing “Screen” section:

Option “UseEdidFreqs” “false”

If all else fails, try running the following command:

sudo nvidia-settings

Under Video Configuration set your resolution and refresh rate, click apply, then save X Config.

I added the UseEdidFreqs as false Option, restarted X, and am now happy once again.  Hope this helps the next poor soul who hits this…  =:)

This is pretty darned cool. I bought a $300 desktop from Walmart a few years ago and it’s still running OpenSUSE and serving as a pretty capable desktop machine for the family. Definitely worthwhile to put our FOSS dollars where our mouths are too, imho. Let’s support the companies who are actively putting the software that we think is best out there! =:)

$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart

Thought this was pretty humorous. Went looking for unread KDE mail today and found these 2 e-mails back to back. Does it stink? Is it great? I’m going with the “is great” e-mail, personally… =;)