Category: Technology

It seems that there is another ISP – OTEnet, which is starting providing ADSL at their own DSL platform in Cyprus. From what I know now is that they do have their own platform (so they do not use I-Choice), that they have competitive prices, that they have options for more than 1.5MBits and that they have quite good channels for going out of Cyprus.

I am working with OTEnet for while already, since I use their service in Greece and they seem to be quite good. I have also heard nice feedback from people who use them in Cyprus, but I never had chance to check them here. What I can tell for sure, is that I had very nice support from them when I was getting a line in Greece.

Still playing around FC6 and stuff included :). This time I came around the TomBoy Notes applet for GNOME which provides user with a feature of creating notes. I have seen similar stuff many times (including KNotes in KDE), but this one is much better just because of one additional feature: you can link some text of one note to a other note.

It looks like some simple Wiki for desktop. Very handy. Sometime I just have too many things which are related but are too much to be put on one note. With TomBoy, I can have all my ideas, todos and other stuff organized and easy accessible.

It seems that for the past few days I got stuck on checking up different bits of software. This time I want to share some more of my expirience:

1. NetworkManager – I haven\’t checked this apps for a while now and I was amazed on how good it is. It detects all network settings and informs me about all WiFi networks available in the area. It is also very handy to switch to a WiFi connection detected just by selecting it in the list.

2. Firefox 2 – I have installed FF2 immediately after I got FC6 running on my laptop. It seems to good, with some additional nice features like inline spell check, but I have missed one other thing there – a restart session restore (thanks for CBN to pointing it out). Now I have removed a Google Sync extension since I was using it only to restore my pages and now it can be done directory by Firefox built-in functionality.

3. GNOME – I\’ve been using KDE for a long time and like it a lot, but it seems that GNOME works much better (with all those effects and whatever) in FC6 release. I think that I will probably stick with GNOME for a while and see what I do later (though I am waiting for KDE 4 a lot).

I know that IE is not the best browser out there, but since I do some web-development and I need the web-sites I do to be also compatible with IE, I have to have IE installed on my linux box. Fortunately, there are guys out there who created a very nice script to set everything up automatically. The only thing to be done is to install wine-* and cabextractor packages from yum and then run the script. Works great.

For the script and installation instructions (for fedora) go here.

Ok, I am finally in the mood of posting some more info on my experience with fedora core 6.

First of all I would like tell one more time that I feel very impressed with new visual effects provided my Compiz. I have seen the 3d desktop effects before, but here it is much faster (almost no impacts on CPU) and there more effects with windows and others.

I have found a very nice post which shows how to set up nvidia drivers, install some missing parts of software so you can play mp3 files and more. In addition to this post, I would like to note that the described way of installing nvidia drivers didn\’t work for me. There was a strange thing with pre-requisite of kernel RPM. It was trying to install the same version of kernel I already had and thus yum was giving me errors. What I did is I manually installed the package needed providing the –replace-files and –replacepkgs arguments to rpm command. After that the kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drivers-nvidia were installed successfully. Another note here is that apart of setting up additional options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as described in the provided post I had to add a missing modes option to show which video resolutions are to be used.

Another thing I noticed is that compiz doesn\’t work with KDE by default (provided you install KDE). There is a workaround though: create a bin directory in your home, create a shell script (something like compiz-kde.sh) with the next content:

#!/bin/bash

compiz –replace gconf decoration transset wobbly fade minimize cube rotate &

gnome-window-decorator &

don\’t forget to chmod +x the file. Then create a desktop shortcut to this script move the shortcut to ~/.kde/Autostart directory.

Basically, this will do the following: when KDE starts, it will run the script as autostart. The script will run compiz and tell it to replace the current VM. Then the script will run the gnome-window-decorator since the native KDE windows decorations are not supported. The only problem here is that KDE desktop pager doesn\’t work properly.

Another thing is that if you don\’t like the standard keyboard shortcuts used with compiz, you can change them with gconf-editor (First you need to get gconf-editor by running yum install gconf-editor). Open the gconf-editor and go to apps->compiz->plugins. Then just select a plugin you are interested to change keys for and do the needed changes :)

Finally, you might have problems with flash plugin for firefox. The problem is that flash graphics is displayed, but all text is missing. For this, you need to apply actions described at Macromedia FAQ #11 as follows:

mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/
ln -s /etc/X11/fs/config /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config

After that, just restart the firefox :)

If you have a laptop with Intel Wireless card (like mine – HP nx6110), then you need to do the same operations you did in FC5 – update the firmware by installing the ipw2200-firmware package (yum install ipw2200-firmware).
I think that this is it for the moment. If you have any questions and want some more info – just let me know :)