Linux

The upgrade from fedora core 4 to fedora core 5 went fairly well ( using the upgrade method mentioned here... ) except for a hiccup with the X display using the current nVidia driver. Luckily Stanton Finley maintains an upto date FC5 installation notes with which I was able to quickly troubleshoot the nvidia display driver.

Here is a synopsis of what I did to fix it:

If you have updated to the latest FC4 kernel -- kernel-2.6.16-1.2069_FC4 and the nvidia driver will not compile with this version ( errors out while trying to compile a kernel module with NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8178-pkg1.run ) then head over to nvnews.net and apply the cumulative patch mentioned there.

I have repackaged the updated 1.0-8178 driver into a custom .run package and can be downloaded here -- NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8178-pkg0-custom.run

md5sum: 4a6afb103e18a9263df71861752133f0

I have had a Dell Latitude D800 for over a year now and recently had the dreaded "Drifting Mouse" problem as discussed in the Dell Support Forum.

Fortunately, I also came across a linux solution which talks about disabling the "Stick Pointer" using the "Synaptics Driver" which comes default with FC4.

Here is the gist of it which worked for me:

I use SquirrelMail and seperate out my missed spam email to a "Train/SPAM" folder and the wrongly tagged ones to "Train/HAM" folder and automate the process of training SpamAssassin via a daily cron.

Put the "SAtrain.sh" file in "/etc/cron.daily" directory.

  #!/bin/bash
  # SAtrain.sh

  # Trains SpamAssassin with Spam and Ham mbox feeds...
  # Put this file in "/etc/cron.daily" directory.
  # chmod 700 "/etc/cron.daily/SAtrain.sh"

  echo "Training SpamAssassin Begin:"
  echo "Learning from Spam..."
  /usr/bin/sa-learn --spam --configpath=/etc/mail/spamassassin --showdots --mbox /home/user/mail/Train/Spam
  sleep 10
  echo "Learning from Ham..."
  /usr/bin/sa-learn --ham --configpath=/etc/mail/spamassassin --showdots --mbox /home/user/mail/Train/Ham
  sleep 10
  echo "Clearing Spam Feed..."
  cat /dev/null > /home/user/mail/Train/Spam
  echo "Clearning Ham Feed..."
  cat /dev/null > /home/user/mail/Train/Ham
  echo "Training SpamAssassin Completed!"
  

With spamassassin trained daily and my "required_hits set to 1.9" in my "~/.spamassassin/user_prefs" file, I have been able to get an accuracy of emails being tagged as spam for about 99.9% of my emails... Woohooo!!

Related Reading:

Bayes In SpamAssassin
Bayes FAQ

MailScanner is good at filtering out the emails with attached worms and viruses. However, it does this at the expense of a high server cpu load when there is a sudden influx of auto-generated email bombardment from an IP that has been infected.

Most recent of which causing havoc is the Nyxem.E (aliases: Email-Worm.Win32.Nyxem.e, Kama Sutra, W32/MyWife.d@MM) worm set to execute on the third of each month (e.g. February 3, 2006).

Here is a quick documentaion of what I have done to autoreject emails from ISPs that are generating rogue emails.

GnoCHM is a CHM (Microsoft Compressed HTML Help) file viewer. It is designed to integrate nicely with Gnome. It uses PyCHM, a Python package that exports the CHMLIB API.

1. You will need to add the following lines to your yum config, "/etc/yum.repos.d/dries.repo":
   

   [dries]
   name=Extra Fedora rpms dries - $releasever - $basearch
   baseurl=http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/dries/RPMS
   gpgcheck=1
   enabled=0
   

2. Import dries GPG key:

   # rpm --import http://dries.studentenweb.org/rpm/RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt
   

3. Run yum enabling dries repos and install "gnochm":

   # yum --enablerepo=dries install gnochm
   

   This will also install all the required packages: chmlib, python-chm and gnome-python2-gconf.

Nepali version of Linux ‘NepaLinux’ launched - Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya undertook the Nepal component of the 30-month long PAN Localization Project, a multi-nation localization project being conducted in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, with the support of International Development and Research Center (IDRC), Canada. This project includes a Nepali GNU/Linux distribution 'NepaLinux' comprising of localized GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla suite, and other utilities that include Nepali Spellchecker, Thesaurus, Nepali Unicode support, etc. This distribution can be used in Nepali as well in English environment.

Now to get my hands-on and do some testing...

Recently had a problem with my volume control applet after an up2date on FC4 which would come up with the error, "No volume control elements and/or devices found".

Doing a simple `gst-register-0.8` as root. Logging out and logging back in resolved this issue.

It registers all the GStreamer plug-ins and creates a listing of their properties so that the plugin is loaded on startup of GStreamer based applications.

If you are looking to purchase printers compatible with Linux... I would suggest going with HP products as I have had no problems with configuring and priting to HP printers.

HP has an opensource Linux Inkjet Driver Project located at: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/ with excellent installation documentation at: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/install.php

The HP Linux Printing project provides printing support for over 300 printers including DeskJets, OfficeJets, Photosmarts, Business Inkjets and LaserJets. Check the products supported via: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/productssupported.php

If you notice OpenOffice taking a while to start-up even with a 1GB memory for your desktop machine, then you are not alone. This is because by default the application only uses 9MB of the RAM for it's graphic cache. To increase the Graphic Cache, go to "Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Memory" and increase the "Graphics Cache" from 9M to about 128MB (Adjust this accordingly depending on your usage and available RAM). Restart OpenOffice and you will notice that the latency has now dissapeared...

While you are at it, the Memory per object setting allocates memory for each object. The default is 2.4 MB which may need to be increased if you are working with high quality images or decreased if you are not really using images and you need to save on memory resources.