evad.zone

After installing Fedora 9 on my laptop (which went pretty smoothly, hence no dedicated entry for this), I’ve figured that Google Picasa for Linux 2.7 doesn’t start at all. To be specific, it crashes with following output:

[evad@D620 ~]$ picasa
/usr/bin/picasa: line 139: 27689 Segmentation fault   "$PIC_BINDIR"/wrapper check_dir.exe.so
/usr/bin/picasa: line 175: 27784 Segmentation fault   "$PIC_BINDIR/wrapper" regedit /E $registry_export HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-4\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences\

Pretty nasty, isn’t it? Sounds interesting? Read more…

Wicd is an application that manages wired and wireless connections in nice and easy manner. You might say that NetworkManager already does that and is enabled by default, but wicd has several important advantages over NM. Here are few:

• It just works. Really.
• Wicd works in the background as a daemon that connects to the network as soon as system starts up, not only after logging into user’s desktop. (You’ll consider that as a HUGE advantage if for some reason X server won’t start one day and you’d end up stuck in text-mode only, desperately looking for solutions.)
• It doesn’t ask you for a keyring/WEP/WPA passwords over and over. You type it into connection profile only once and forever.
• Allows you to define static IP/DNS configuration without a hassle.
• Did I mention wicd just works?

Sounds interesting? Read more…

I’ve been using Nokia N810 Internet Tablet for some time, and I didn’t like its default desktop fonts. Device is powered by Debian-based distro, with Hildon desktop on top, which basically is GNOME for handheld devices. Not surprising that I found a solution for changing fonts on GNOME’s website. Sounds interesting? Read more…

I’ve recently had opportunity to install Fedora on Dell Precision M4300 laptop. It has pretty powerful nVidia Quadro FX 360M video adapter with 512MB of video memory. However, desktop 3D effects sometimes were not very smooth, especially after some time of inactivity. The first few movements (like cube rotation, dragging windows) seemed to be quite lazy in response for the first few seconds, but later it is getting very smooth. The reason behind that is video adapter’s GPU being stepped down to the lowest performance level after some time of inactivity. Once desktop got busy again - performance level jumped up, and effects were smooth again. Simple as that, and it can be easily monitored via nVidia X Server Settings utility, in PowerMizer section. Of course, there is a solution for that. Sounds interesting? Read more…

I’ve been using ipw3945 driver ever since I’ve had a laptop with Intel 3945ABG wireless adapter. Despite few issues it had in the beginning, I was really happy to have that driver on-board, as the very latest version 1.2.1 of ipw3945 proved to be very stable and reliable. However, some time ago, someone decided to drop ipw3945 development in favour of iwl3945 / mac80211 projects. If you’re interested what do I think about it, read on. Sounds interesting? Read more…

Right-click file in Nautilus & send via Thunderbird feature never worked correctly for me. Well, compose window was always popping up, but instead of file attached, I could only see recipient (To: field) as attachment=/home/evad/somefile.txt. Lovely. But when I’ve once spotted colleague at work, an Ubuntu user, who had that feature working properly I’ve decided to put some work on Google. Sounds interesting? Read more…

Installing new kernel very often brings a lot of joy and excitement for a user - 2.6.24 was not an exception. VMware didn’t compile, throwing nice and friendly Unable to build the vmmon module error in my face. Don’t we just love that? Sounds interesting? Read more…

Desktop effects are cool. But they are getting way cooler when you use tools like ccsm, which give you total control over all those fancy effects that you can show off to Windows users, or your (girl|boy)friend, or even to yourself while there’s nothing else to do. However, regarding a huge number of plugins and/or options available in ccsm, setting all things up nicely takes quite a while. It is rewarding, but again - you wouldn’t rather go through all of this again, would you? But what to do if your precise compiz setup suddenly refuses to work, leaving you with plain and default (and boring) settings, that are far away from being cool as you wanted? Read on. Sounds interesting? Read more…

While suspend feature in my laptop was working more-or-less right with Fedora 7, ever since I’ve upgraded to Fedora 8, I was not able to use it at all. Because my computer has nVidia video adapter, I just assumed that is a video driver’s fault, and never really investigated problem properly. Until today. Sounds interesting? Read more…

One of the new features of Fedora 8 / GNOME was storing remembered Evolution passwords in GNOME’s keyring. So now not only NetworkManager or Nautilus asks for a keyring password in certain situations, but also Evolution does the same while checking email. How useful and convenient that is? And of course, there is no option to turn it off easily. However, I have accidentally ran into page explaining solution to get rid of that annoying keyring password prompt. Sounds interesting? Read more…