Ok, one of the first things that I got annoyed with in the new Mandriva 2006 install on the laptop was the event triggered sounds. Popup notification window one sound, error message – glass breaking, etc. etc…. So, I started trying to remember where to cut all that stuff off. It took a bit of digging to find it, because it’s not in the KDE control panel under “sound” where it might be found in a Windows setup…
Category: Tech Support
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II
Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
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Running UltraVNC viewer under wine
I talked in the last entry about using UltraVNC and UltraVNC Single Click (ultravnc sc) as a means of doing remote desktop support. The idea is that you (the technical support person), setup vncviewer to listen for connections, then the end user with pc problems can download your customized ultravnc server that will connect to your viewer through firewalls/etc. This has a lot of things going for it. 1) ease of use by the end user 2) only one network to make firewall configuration changes on, 3) small quick download. The biggest downside I see is that the ultravnc viewer doesn’t run on linux.
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Ultravnc for remote computer support
A little while back I talked some about TightVNC which for a long time has been my favorite implementation of a remote framebuffer, or remote desktop viewing protocol known as VNC (Virtual Network Computing.) The original VNC (now realvnc) came out of AT&T research labs in the UK and has developed quite a following as a pcanywhere alternative depending on what you need to do. Now, tightvnc has been a favorite of mine for a couple reasons. 1) it’s well supported under linux which is a must for me…, 2) it excels at slower speed connections. Which is also fairly important to me.
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Update on Long registry entries bug
Incidents.org has an update on yesterdays story of very long registry entries not being visible in most registry tools (regedit among others.) They have an updated list of what does and does not read these long keys. They’ve alluded to nasties in the wild that are already taking advantage of this and have confirmed that the length is greater than 254 characters. On handler has written a program to scan the registry for these stealth entries
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Make panoramic pictures with a digital camera (or any other)
There’s another great article at newsforge this evening. I remember seeing some time back a camera which took panoramic pictures. The photographer would hold it steady over his head and the camera would slowly circle around to get a 360 degree photo. In fact I think I remember seeing a large group picture where someone played with the idea and ran around to be in the picture twice.
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How to Recover deleted items from Outlook .pst file
About 6 months ago I had a customer call with a bit of a crisis. They had deleted some folders in Outlook without realizing the cleared out a few things they NEEDED to keep. Up until then I hadn’t had much opportunity to try to find out what was recoverable, but I discovered there is a pretty easy way to deal with this.
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Running Windows applications under Linux
There are a number of Windows applications that may not have suitable replacements under linux. I know a lot of people that have considered switching, but there was “one program holding them back.” Fortunately there are several options on how to keep that one application from holding you back.
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Wine help
No, not red or white. I’m talking Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) , which allows windows applications to run under linux. One of the sites that I’ve found that has some great tips regarding Wine is Franks Corner. For several years this site has been a good resource of “how to” get things to work whether it’s games, office applications or other software.
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Boot discs
I’ve been using a site the last two days that I thought others might find useful. If you don’t know about it already, it’s bootdisk.com. They have available for download all sorts of Dos, Windows and Linux boot discs.