Inside the magician’s hat

I’ve been using GKRellm for the last 6~7 years, and I truly love it! But after all this time I resolved to change and move on to something new… well, I found the “not so new” Conky :)

I have only good things to say about it so far: Very easy configuration, doesn’t eat all my CPU/MEM, and does not require GTK libs… I’m really enjoying the experience lol

You can get my config file here. It was written based on darcon’s config.

And now the final result :P

Cool!

Howdy!

I’m currently adding support for SLES11 on the IBM Installation Toolkit (http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/lopdiags/installtools/home.html), and was stuck on some network configuration issues. In SLES10 we used to bind the network configs to a certain interface by using the interface’s MAC address to create the ifcg-eth-id-* files under /etc/sysconfig/network/.

This type of binding is necessary because the kernel gives names to the devices based on the order it loads the modules. Imagine you have a machine with 2 NICs, one using the e1000 module, and the other using tg3. If you do

[code]
#modprobe e1000
#modprobe tg3
[/code]

then you’ll have eth0 -> e1000, and eth1 -> tg3. If you change the modprobe order, then eth0 -> tg3 and eth1 -> e1000. This is a big issue when dealing with devices that can be hotplugged (or when running some strange types of installation, which is my case :D).

Beginning on OpenSuSE 10.3 they stopped using the ifcfg-eth-id-* approach and moved on to udev. With udev it is possible to rename the devices by using udev rules, and this is extremely useful to give persistent names to network interfaces, based on their MAC address, for instance. See http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html for more details.

Ok, so far so good, but this change broke my code that I used on SLES10 to configure network interfaces :P

Now, there are only ifcfg-<device> files under /etc/sysconfig/network. Inside each ifcfg-<device>, there’s an option called LLADDR, that is the MAC address for the interface. Also, the autoinst.xml file changed a little bit – below is the <interface> part of one SLES11 autoinst.xml file, note that there’s a <lladdr> entry there :) :

[code]
<interface>
<bootproto>dhcp4</bootproto>
<device>eth0</device>
<lladdr>aa:bb:cc:dd:ff:00</lladdr>
<name>Ethernet Network Card</name>
<startmode>auto</startmode>
</interface>
[/code]

This autoinst.xml config will result on file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0, containing a LADDR variable with value aa:bb:cc:dd:ff:00, along with the correct udev rules to bind the name eth0 to the correct interface.

Hope this is useful to someone else!

See you :)

I was kind of “afraid” of moving from my KDE3.5 to KDE4. You know, this KDE3.5 is the one I’ve been running for the last 3 years, and was working like a charm. Everything in its right place, with my themes, my icons, chinese input, accesskeys, OOohh God, 3 years with the same installation aren’t 3 days :D

But the time comes to everything, and it knocked KDE’s door as well. I was willing to have those fancy widgets in my desktop and also have a taste of the so called semantic-desktop (nice catch indeed). I tried KDE4 beta/rc and kde4.1, and I was very confused on “why have they released something so _unfinished_?”.. and then just got back to my old 3.5.

Today, I finally had the time to put KDE4.2 running in my notebook, and I’m really impressed with KDE’s evolution. It’s getting mature and very usable… works out of the “emerge”, I’d say (Yeah, I use Gentoo), and I feel the time came to me to move on and start using 4.2 :)

Till now everything is fine. Had some troubles with Akonadi server, but got them resolved quickly. I’m afraid I’ll have some hard time to bring all my kdepim configurations back, but this is another story, another post.

So far so good!

Kudos for the KDE team!

If you’re looking for color schemes for Vim, then you’ll enjoy the following link:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/

Some of the schemes will work only in the Vim’s graphical interface (GVim), but there are others with color configs for Vim (running on a terminal, like xterm).

If you want a scheme that will work on vim in the terminal, make sure it has cterm, ctermbg and ctermfg configs. It’s also a good idea to run vim on a 256 color terminal. Take a look on these pointers for more on this:

http://www.jukie.net/~bart/blog/20060824224842

http://blog.cynapses.org/2006/08/09/konsole-256color/

I’ve been trying to find a nice way for printing chm files in book style – no lucky!

Both Xchm and Kchmviewer are very good programs for viewing chm files in the computer, but they lack the ability to print whole documents at once (if some one knows how to do that with these apps, please drop a comment/email/whatever :D)

Then I came to know this great project – chm2pd. Just get it, install it with its dependencies (very easy, just follow the steps in the README that comes with the source code) and you’re ready to go! Convert your chm files to pdf and print them as you please.

More on this great script cand be found on:  http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10275