Category Archives: Linux

I’ve known for a while that it’s possible to run FFI Photoshop plugins but there are problems getting 8bf plugins working. pspi.exe can be used to run them if you’re running Windows GIMP but not in Linux unfortunately. This discussion on the Wine list suggests that a mini-wine loader such as is used by Mplayer might go some way to achieving this goal but such a loader doesn’t exist yet.
That’s a pity as this virtual photographer plugin looks nice. All the effects can be done manually in the GIMP too but why not take a shortcut if it’s there?

I knew it could be done, but not how. Looks like Gnome has a “gdmflexiserver” command that launchs another login or informs you if another login is already present! This page has a few more details and screenshots.
Zeus has some great icon art too..

I came across this bug ages ago on my RedHat systems and several times in the past week.
$ cd /mnt/dos/photos
$ du -csh
du: fts_read failed: Stale NFS file handle
Segmentation fault
$ ls
ls: .: Stale NFS file handle
Here’s a detailed RedHat bug report where Alan Cox supplied a fix way back in May this year. Why the 2.4 kernel in Debian Linux still shows this bug happening is a mystery to me!
I do have 2.6 installed as well but I had to drop to 2.4 to burn some CDs. I can’t remember if I saw this happening there too.

If you go visit sco.com really quickly, you’ll notice that all is not quite right.. Newsforge has more on the story, as does Netcraft.

In a heated discussion about the grand vision that people have for the Irish Linux Users Group, Justin Mason suggested (sorry! no link, the archive is broken again!) that we use a Wiki to keep the information on the site current and uptodate. He outlined his own ideas and suggestions in his post, How to have turn a stale project site into a useful Wiki and it’s not a bad idea at all!
I’m in favour of it, who’s with me? Why use a wiki?

Niall Sheridan writes:

>> On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 15:50 +0000, Niall Walsh wrote:
>> [snippage]
>>
>
>>> > The website contains lots of out of date information.
>
>>
>> Update it then. From what I hear, the webmaster happily will accept
>> contributions.

A good tip — moving to a wiki helps a *lot* here. We found that our stale old SpamAssassin website has become the main source of live, up to date info now that we wiki-ized it.

(It turns out that vandalism and people throwing up crappy info isn’t a serious problem at all. See http://taint.org/2004/09/28/191712a.html for details.)

After a few small glitches and problems I have Debian Testing running on my desktop machine at home.
The install process is a lot easier than before and really, I have/had only 2 problems. One was with setting up X – The “generic mouse” entry which pointed at /dev/input/mouse/mice or something didn’t work so I commented that out. The detection of my monitor worked, but it generated mode lines which were a little conservative. I couldn’t get more than 1024×768 on a 19″ monitor! That was easily solved by copying the values from my FC2 install.
The locale setting is a bit screwy too. I tried to get it to understand the Euro symbol by choosing ie_IE@euro (or similar) but now ‘”‘ becomes “#” and “|” becomes “>”! I’m sure there’s an easy fix, and changing the locale settings seem to fix bash/screen sessions but not X. More work to do there!
Anyway, xmms with mp3 support was installed by default, but I noticed mplayer wasn’t there. You can download mplayer packages for Debian here, makes things simple to install!

Have you ever tried du -csh .* to find the size of all the hidden files in your home directory? It never works properly for me as I think it only counts the size of the .* files in each of the named directories.
Anyway, the following solves that problem and shows you where all those thumbnails have been generataed by gthumb or nautilaus.. 🙂

for i in `ls -A`; do du -sh $i; done

Yes, this desktop screenshot is just showing off! Who wants a transparent movie? 🙂

A lengthy thread on the ILUG list over the last few days has sparked my interest in installing Debian again. I tried Stable several years ago and wasn’t impressed by how ancient all the packages were. I should have used testing as it’s fairly up to date!

Well, well. It’s much simpler these days to configure Squid as a transparent proxy than ever before! Getting it to limit bandwidth is a piece of cake too! 🙂