Spin Ink

Wordpress 2.0 came out today, much to the delight of bloggers every where. I was somewhat hesitant to upgrade my own site for fears of breaking the Gallery2 integration. Mostly, I was afraid that my images I have integrated with my site, would dissappear. Furthermore, I thought that my modrewrite URLs for both my articles and my gallery would no longer work, which would really mess up google referrals.

So, I did some testing on a spare domain to be sure that everything would work. Just to be safe, I backed up my entire domain, and then began the very short and sweet Wordpress upgrade process. It only took a couple of minutes and much to my surprise, my site was still in one piece! My galleries are working fine, all my images are still present and accounted for.

This success can be attributed to the very hard work of the Wordpress development team. Also, a huge thanks goes out to Greg for doing souch a fantastic job with the Wordpress Gallery2 Integration plugin. While my resources are very limited, I urge you all to support these awesome projects and the people that develop them.

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I hope everyone has a safe holiday season. I’m home with the family now, visiting and catching up. Mom got me a Hauppauge PVR-150 this year and I cannot wait to get home and setup my MythTV box. I spent a good 12 hours figuring out how to compile MythTV on an AMD64 box and I hope I will be able to just drop the card in my machine, go through a quick setup, and be done with it. I will be detailing this process in a later post.

I also received several tasty coffees, including Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels blends, which I am anxious to try. In addtion, mom gave me a calendar with funny/strange websites, some chocolate covered cherries/strawberries and some great toys/treats for my cat, Wilson. The rest of my family gave me clothes and made a sizeable donation to the ‘Support a Starving College Student’ fund.

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Many people have had problems doing a network install of SuSE Linux. In this guide I hope to clear up some of this confusion by providing step-by-step instructions. There is more than one way to accomplish this task. I willl do my best to cover all the bases, but should I miss one, please leave a comment. I will cover the FTP/HTTP network install methods.

To do an FTP/HTTP network install of SuSE Linux, you will need a pretty fast network connection. A standard SuSE install is approximately 2.4GB’s. You can do a custom or minimal install(~675MB) and select more or less packages if you like. To get started you will need either the first install CD of SuSE or the boot.iso burnt to disc. (more…)

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If you are like me, then you want your machines to be as up-to-date as possible. I do not mean using alphas and betas up-to-date, that is just asking for trouble. I mean latest stable package up-to-date. While these packages are considered stable, they have not been through the same level of testing as those that were released with SuSE 10. As a result, you could run into application crashes and other random issues. I have been using this method regularly since suse 9.2 and I have not had any major issues with it, but you should still be aware that some problems may arise. I resolved the 2 issues I have had by just going back to the older version of the package.

This tutorial assumes that you know what YaST is, and that you have already completed the tutorial to add YaST Installation Sources. (more…)

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For SuSE users, this upgrade is pretty painless, unless you are a dialup user. Updating to KDE 3.5 from 3.4 will require a good 500MB download, so dialup users need not apply. That said, lets upgrade KDE.

The first step is to be sure you have a nice selection of repositories setup in your YaST Installation Sources. Technically, only the Supplementary KDE Source is required, but I suggest adding them all in order to get the most functionality. Once you have the additional YaST Installation Sources added, you are ready to begin the upgrade process.

1. Start YaST -> Software Manager (*Install and Remove Software for 9.3 and before)
2. Change the Filter drop-down menu from ‘Search’ to ‘Selections’
3. For both the “KDE Desktop Environment” and “All of KDE” selections, right click in the right hand pane and select ‘All in this list’ - > ‘Update if newer version available’
4. Click ‘Accept’ and wait for the installation to finish.

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The first step is to visit a SuSE mirror and save the SuSE rpm of Firefox 1.5 for your platform to your machine. This mirror has packages for SuSE 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, and 10.0 in PowerPC(ppc), 32, and 64bit flavors. Once downloaded, there are a few ways to install the rpm file. First, we will go over the command line method.

1. Open a Terminal window
2. Navigate to the directory where you saved the Firefox 1.5 rpm.
3. Type: ’su’ and then provide your root password
4. Type: ‘rpm -Uvh MozillaFirefox-1.5-0.1.i386.rpm’ (your filename may be different)

*Note* the ‘U’ is for upgrade, ‘v’ is for verbose, and ‘h’ will output the packages hash.

Another method for upgrading to Firefox 1.5 is with YaST is as follows:

1. Open your file manager of choice, I am using Konqueror
2. Navigate to the directory that contains the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 rpm
3. Right-click the rpm file, click ‘Actions’ -> ‘Install with YaST‘ and provide your root password

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While examining my server logs it occured to me that not all SuSE Linux users are irc users. Where do these people go to find more information on how to use SuSE Linux? I suspect that google and online forums are their main sources of support. So in an effort to provide more resources for this user base, I am going to do my best to cover the common tasks and questions we receive in the SuSE irc channel on freenode. First I plan to cover ‘how to upgrade Firefox to version 1.5′. If you have any suggestions for topics that you would like me to cover, please leave them in a comment on this entry. Below is a list of a few more articles about SuSE I have written.

• SuSE 10 For Windows Users
• Additional YaST Sources

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Welcome to the age of the Internet gangster. Gone are the days when young computer nerds sat alone in their rooms figuring out how to break in to their schools’ computer systems to change grades. It is more like the Sopranos, with bosses and kingpins running the show. Identity theft via phishing and key loggers have seen a massive surge of popularity in the past year. We must be more careful than ever about where we use the internet and what we send over it.

read more | digg story

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I would talk about how to widen Firefox’s menus by using a custom style sheet, known as userChrome.css, to tweak the user interface. While most users my not find this applicable, those of us who run our monitors at very high resolutions like 1280×1024, 1600×1200 or higher, will find this to be a must have Firefox tweak. This problem is most annoying and obvious on RSS feeds like those from BBC News or Digg.com for example. This screenshot illustrates the problem more clearly. Notice how some of the longer article names have been truncated with ‘…’.

When you encounter this you ask yourself, “How can I make this bookmark menu stretch wide enough to fit more of the headline?” Immediately you look in the Firefox prefences and come up empty handed. Those of you more familiar with tweaking Firefox would probably search the ‘about:config’ page for a possible ‘width’ or ‘menu’ setting. Unfortunately, there is no solution for this problem there either. I scoured Mozilla.org as well as the web in general with Google, and I even talked to the actual Firefox developers on irc.mozilla.org about the problem.

Despite all of my efforts, the above sources could not give me the a definitive list of the CSS classes used Firefox to define the user interface. All I was able to find was bits and pieces of information about how to customize the UI. As a result, I had to do a good bit of trial and error in order to figure what I needed to add to my userChrome.css file. So now I am sharing my customized userChrome.css with the world, in hopes that others who wish to widen their Firefox menus will not have as difficult of a time as I did. Just save this file to your Firefox profiles ‘chrome’ dir. Be sure to restart Firefox, and you should a have much wider search box as well as your bookmark menus will now fit much longer links and headlines. If you would like more information on editing the userChrome.css file, please visit the ‘Customize Firefox‘ Mozilla page.

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