Had a go at creating a website today. This is something I've done before, but this time I set myself the goal of using open standards and open source software wherever possible. My tools of choice today were The Gimp and Sci TE. It took me about three hours to get half a page up ( http://www.boogdesign.com/design.html ), which is about 6 times longer than I'd be expecting it to take, but a good proportion of that turned out to be fiddling with the CSS. I got on OK with The Gimp once I figured out that most of the useful operations came from right clicking the image and not looking in the main menu, including turning the layers pallette on.
Of course afterwards I tested it on Windows IE, all those beautiful PNG with alpha channel transparency come out as large black rectangles :(
Fedora cdrecord differs from the standard in that the device is specified in IDE style rather than the 0,1,0 bus numberings of the original.
RPMs
Build an rpm from a src.rpm:
Default Console
Switch out of X Windows by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or F2, F3 etc), switch back (on Fedora) with Ctrl-Alt-F7
Gentoo Stuff
After doing massive damage to your system by upgrading from stable to ~x86, a handy command is revdep-rebuild
Slackware Stuff
If you're going to mount multiple partitions into your filesystem on the initial install then make sure you create the mountpoints on the root disk in another console after formatting.
Creating a Grub Boot Floppy
Cups, Samba and Windows printing
If you're having trouble printing anything from Windows to your Cups printer shared through Samba, see if you're getting stuff like this in your error_log:
If so, check the two files mime.convs and mime.types in /etc/cups – there is a line at the end of each referring to application/octet-stream, both must be uncommented for printing to work from Windows.
Update – I've now switched to the Livna RPMs, because I realised 3D acceleration wasn't working and I couldn't compile the fglrx kernel module with the ATI RPM, turns out I couldn't with the Livna RPM either, there's an issue with the 2.6.11 kernel, so I've switched back to 2.6.10 and kept the Livna versions because it's late...//
Further update – now with FC5 the new kmod packages from Livna are by far the most convenient method of dealing with ATI drivers
I've just run into a problem trying to install the latest Nvidia drivers onto White Box 4 on my machine at work (an IBM Net Vista) which has an on board Vanta. When I ran the installer I got a message saying that my GPU wasn't supported by this version of the driver, and I should look for 'Nvidia Legacy Drivers' instead and providing a URL. Only problem being, there were no 'legacy drivers' anywhere on the website. I eventually figured out, from a post on the Ubuntu forums, that I should just install an older version of the normal driver – 7174 in my case.
Update – Note that Gentoo now has a package nvidia-legacy-drivers which replaces the old nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx ebuilds
Clean old packages out of Gentoo
To unmerge older duplicate versions of packages you have installed use the following command:
emerge -Pv
Note that this will remove all your old kernel packages as well as a number of builds in slots which are actually needed (like different verrsions of automake), but it should be simple enough to install them again afterwards with a -uD.
Set web file and dir permissions
To change all directories to rwxr-xr-x :
find . -type d -print | xargs chmod u=rwx,g=rx,o=x
To change all files to rwxrr :
find . -type f -print | xargs chmod u=rwx,g=r,o-rwx
http://www.conglomerate.org/