Category: Uncategorized

A little late (but better later than never) I got myself an EEE-PC.
First and important thing to do
was to tell it to talk to me in english,
because I hate it, when computers talk to me in denglish
(as this awful modern mixture of german and english is called,
and yes, of course, I use it myself in spoken language and I hate it,
but at least for written language I insist on avoiding it),
so how to modify the default locale?
And pls don’t you just modifiy /etc/default/locale!

$ sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    

I found wiki.eeeuser.com and forum.eeeuser.com, most valuable!!!
Really!!!
Go to the wiki and make the best of it!!!

I added a few Xandros package repositories, that got listed there.

I found two package managers: synaptic (GUI!!!) and aptitude (ncurses based),
obviously you will always have to call them through sudo.

Sometimes you will nevertheless want to install a package on the command line,
this is how it looks:

$ sudo apt-get install YOUR_PACKAGE
    

These were a few of the packages I installed first this way:
openssh-server, nxml-mode, rcs.

Actually the init script, that got installed with the openssh-server package is somehow flawed:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh # it crashes and core dumps (almost)
    

So I have to run this instead for being able to access my EEE from my network:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/sshd
    

I certainly also installed GNU emacs,
but I did so using one of the package managers.

I tried the descriptions for using bluetooth,
and it looks like it works,
but when I tried to connect to the Internet via bluetooth and one of my UMTS phones as modem,
it didn’t work.
But I successfully connected to the Internet, when I USB-wired that UMTS phone to the EEE.

The EEE-PC seriously comes with an up-to-date and updatable Firefox,
and I installed Adblock Plus (and its most important filter subscriptions, so all the obnoxious ads stay away from my screen),
Sage (my RSS reader),
and GMarks (so I can access Google bookmarks).

Initially the Music Manager refused to play my MP3-s,
but I installed a few MP3-related packages through synaptic and everything was fine.
Now I can play my MP3-s (that reside on a fat USB disk attached to my Linux NEO box)
through my home WLAN,
and I overly enjoy it.

Of course I switched to the Full Desktop aka Advanced Mode in the meantime.

I followed the Multiuser mode HOWTO,
and now I have to login before X starts up,
and user is not the only user any longer.

My router is not just a router.
To the inside world
it lets me also attach phones and esp. also DECT wireless phones.
To the outside world
it connect also to my SIP (VoIP) account
and the telephone network.
I registered all my DECT wireless phones to my router,
and I got rid of all the wired phones.
Just my fax stays connected to my router,
so I can send out faxes once in a while.
Incoming faxes get converted to PDF by some provider.
My current router, that can do all that and much more, is a FRITZ!Box 7270.

Q: Did you know, how to make use of what gets defined in HTML through the accesskeyattribute of the a tag?
A: You have to press some Modifier + the defined accesskey.
All the HTML generated from my DocBook files defines access keys for navigating to the statically previous and next page, the home page, and to climb up the tree.
For the Firefox on openSUSE Linux the Modifier is Alt+Shift,
for the Firefox on OS X Snow Leopard the Modifier is simply Ctrl,
for Google Chrome on OS X Snow Leopard the Modifier is Ctrl+Alt.

O, I enjoyed re-organising my blogs (adding a few details here and there), modifying my computer home directory tree structure, moving a few files from here to there …

In order to do some subversion work from within emacs,
find and load psvn.el,
and then start svn-status on an emacs command line.
I love it.

Created my 1st subversion on my web space using the svn+ssh protocol
along the lines of the PragProg book.
I used this scheme,
because I could get started w/o any admin intervention.
It also behaves fairly safe.

Alright, something on the background:
My web space provider gives me UNIX shell access via ssh.

The svnadmin create ... got executed locally on the machine,
where the repository lives,
afterwards I followed chapter 5 accessing a repository, section on svn+ssh,
you find a free extract of that
book here.

Because of the ssh detail
there is a tiny obstacle to overcome,
until I will be able to share this repository with co-workers.

My ISP employs somebody incredibly helpful to me,
and that guy actually managed to run another svnserver,
just dedicated to me,
fully configurable by myself,
on a fixed port.
I am overwhelmed.

Q: What do I pay them for that service?
A: They regard it as included in my package.

It got mentioned in a magazine.
It’s like “tail” on many files at once,
but much better.
We shall see … .
I will give it a try at work,
where I often have to view and follow more than a single file at a time,
when I restart the applications looking for weird behaviour.