Tag Archives: Linux

I mentioned the GURU LABS review of Red Hat 9 before but what I forgot to say is that it should be required reading for anyone new to this release of Red Hat 9. It has such a wealth of information! It links to this article on adding eyecandy to Red Hat 9 that explains how to change the cursors in your GUI.
The download page has many useful RPMs, including one for mp3 playback, and some very nice looking screensavers!
You really should install apt-rpm too and then apt-get update; apt-get upgrade as there’s already been a number of updates to Samba, Sendmail, Evolution and other packages. Then grab Synaptic by doing apt-get install synaptic and make your package management life much easier!
If you want mp3 playback easily, it’s also available through apt, just apt-get install xmms-mp3 and launch xmms!
Here’s a long slashdot discussion on the new release.

This is my first posting from Red Hat 9 and so far I’m impressed!
Fonts in the GUI are nice, and even though I knew about it, the animated cursors and cursor changes are “pretty” and gave me a pleasant surprise!

Out of curiousity I tried configuring a printer and opened the Red Hat Printer Config tool. This turned out to be a very familiar wizard type application.
When I selected “Windows Network (SMB)” printer the tool displayed the PCs on the local network allowing me to choose the printer easily.
The first test print did fail, but that’s because the printer was turned off. When I printed the test page again it printed! The colours looked a bit strange in the colour wheel, White was a gradient from blue to white, Yellow was white!
I’m not too worried however as all I’ll be printing will be b/w text documents.

More on my experiences to follow..

This article goes some of the way towards explaining how to create a CD based version of Linux that’ll play movies and other media types.
I for one have never managed to get divx working properly in WinXP, or get divx 5 working in Win2k, but they work fine in Linux through mplayer. *shrug*
eMoviX could be very useful!

This guy is brave coming out and saying he thinks KDE is better than Gnome. He even included his email address. *cough*he’ll learn quickly!*cough*
(and the same applies to you rabid Mac and Windows advocates! 🙂

And for my next trick I shall get my 7650 talking to Linux via the Bluetooth dongle that arrived in the post yesterday.
This howto is useful, and links to the Bluez howto too. Unfortunately it all looks rather beta and requires the user compile and patch code.
‘s funny, the CD that comes with the dongle just asks you to run setup.exe (although I couldn’t get it to see my Nokia when I ran it in WinXP last night..)
So, as ever, Linux needs to catch up in this area but then Microsoft and Apple are catching up with Linux in others. (No, I refuse to get into a fight with you Mark on this.. hehe!)

Great list of keyboard bindings thanks to Padraig!

GURU Labs have impressive looking screensavers on their site. You’ll need an Nvidia or ATI chipset to view them though as they require hardware TCL support.
The Guru Labs site is well worth checking out for a wealth of other software packaged for Red Hat 8 and 9.

For as long as I’ve had Red Hat 8.0 installed I’ve had trouble using “man” and other marked up terminal apps. The marked up text appeared as garbage and only by careful examination could one spot the useful information trapped inside! Here’s the answer, courtesy of the Chicago LUNI list. European users may want to try another locale, and Irish users could find “en_IE@euro” most useful!

Karlin Lillington mentioned the ILUG in this Guardian article on Linux!