16 Mar 2011
After a couple of weeks on Wordpress, I have decided that I am using
Categories and Tags badly, basically my tags and categories were close
to being the same and I was struggling to know how to use them.
What I have decided is to cut down on the number of categories and treat
these as “feeds”; so I have a technology feed, a Linux feed, a Debian
feed, and only a couple of others. These are the feeds to which I am
committing to maintain, so if you are only interested in my posts on
Linux, you can feel confident about changing your subscription to my
Linux category.
14 Mar 2011
A nice how-to for KVM and libvirt on Debian Squeeze:
14 Mar 2011
One of the challenges in
Installing Debian on a thin client PC was that the
venue had a guest wireless network, but no wired network, and clearly
these thin client devices did not have wireless capability.
Mike sorted this out by setting up IP forwarding on his laptop, so that
we had a wired network which used his wireless connection as a gateway.
I knew this was technically possible, but I had not actually seen it
done before.
13 Mar 2011
This Saturday I attended the Surrey Linux User Group meeting
held at Sirius in Addlestone. Mike Judd of
Akuna Group brought along a number of thin client
PCs, along with monitors, keyboards, mice and a switch and set a
challenge for attendees to attempt to install Linux on them.
The thin clients were IGEL thin clients with 1GB RAM and 1GB transcend
flash card. The RAM is plenty for Linux, so the main challenge was
keeping the installation under 1GB, when modern Linux distros are
probably 6gb or so.
13 Mar 2011
Google Chrome started stating “The Flash plug-in was blocked because it is out of date.”.
To fix this I entered “about:plugins” in the address bar, and clicked
“disable” against Flash. This results in Google Chrome falling back on
the version of Flash installed in the operating system. If you do not
have Flash installed, then in Debian you can install as follows:
07 Mar 2011
Three things I love about pekwm:
Window grouping: I love the fact that you can middle click on a
window’s titlebar and drop it onto another window and the two
windows join together - with the titlebar split in segments. You can
switch between the applications by clicking on the relevant part of
the titlebar, or use the Windows key with TAB - so just as Alt+Tab
switches between windows, Windows+Tab switches between the
applications grouped inside the current window.
07 Mar 2011
I have just been recommended to try the “tint2” panel. It looks lovely
and minimalist, and has happily taken the kwalletmanager system tray
icon; so hopefully will work on my laptop with battery and wireless
monitors.
06 Mar 2011
After my laptop spontaneously switched off on two separate
occasions, because I had failed to switch on the mains socket, I decided
that something had to be done about the lack of power management in
pekwm.
05 Mar 2011
Apparently the ZX81 is 30 years’ old, wow.
The wedge-shaped box
that started my interest in computers, and led inexorably to my love of
Linux and tinkering with the command-line.
04 Mar 2011
After updating my Kubuntu Mythbuntu Home Theatre PC, it
failed to boot into KDE, leaving me instead at a text login. Fixing the
problem was not difficult, but I actually had problems finding the
correct instructions, and all the instructions that I did find left out
a crucial step. I thought I would write up what I did largely for my
own benefit:
