3ddesktop

Read about 3ddesktop (http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/) and tried it. Works pretty cool. Very resource hungry though.

Invisible glrellm theme

Got transparent gkrellm theme from here:

http://www.esden.net/rocklinux/gkrellm-themes/

added custom font colors.

Firefox 1.0 PR

Firefox 1.0 PR is here.. Well on my Linux box too.
Kept compatible, downloaded upgradable theme and extensions and greyed out the rest as incompatible.
Old bookmarks and password entries are preserved.

gdeskcal

Tried gdeskcal – Desktop calendar with Evolution interface. Very cool.

Other neat calendar apps are:

ccal/gcal: cal replacement

plan : A korganizer on motif.

xcal : a small footprint calendar/notes app

ices, lame, etc

Installed ices 0.4 : Noticed the ices broken suddenly. I get “relocation error: … lame_decode_exit …” during the first track change. Not sure what triggerd it.

Downloaded and installed new version of lame (3.92) . no luck.

Downloaded and installed new (old) version of ices 0.4 (I had 0.3 before). This seem to have fixed the problem. Hacked /etc/init.d/ices to start this version now.

I wonder why “there is nut much interest in streaming mp3” in ices 2.0. Ogg Vorbis may be a good thing, but we are not there yet.

vpn client on linux

Got VPN with DNS working atlast: Tried to have Libranet/Mdk9.2 to boot from the Maxtor 200G disk so I can try Cisco VPN on Kernel 2.4 (There seem known issues with kernel 2.6 which Mdk 10 has). Then it occured to me the right way do this is to try Kernel 2.4 on Mdk 10 itself (stupid). urpmi kernel-source-2.4.25-2mdk did the job. Now to get the source (the vpn client install needs source) used rpmdrake to search for kernel source. Did not find it there. Tried downloading from kenel.org. This source would not work. Tried downloading from rpmseek, rpmfind.,…. . There were problems with all the kernels. Then urpmi kernel-source-2.4.25-2mdk worked pulling the source fro m disk 4. Duh!

Installed vpn-client in /usr/local/bin

Configured /etc/vpnclient/Profiles/IDT.pcf

./vpnclient connect IDT

connects to IDT. All other sites (like blogger.com) work too. (Earlier with vpnc, the nameserver lookup was disabled)

the client seem to replace the /etc/resolv.conf with IDT nameservers.
Added search ixtelecom.com in /etc/resolv.conf. Now I can search for idt hosts with out domain. Very Cool.

To get back the old resolv.conf, do a disconnect. (DONOT KILL/^C the vpn-connect)

Moving to fluxbox (again)

Moving to fluxbox ( again) from GNOME. GNOME WM froze couple of times in the last week .. too much pain starting all the windows all over. Also I miss kipper dearly. Whatever I try, the gcm (or whatever) just does not work right.

Creating favicon

Creating Favicon (the little icon in the address bar in the browser)

Grab a 16×16 png file
Generate an ic o file with icotools
icotool -c -o ~/www/favicon.ico ~/Images/tux/tux16.png

This should work according to some websites, but it did n’t work for me.

So edit index.html and

Ramesh Natarajan’s homepage

Slax Live CD

Tried Slax Live CD (slackware based) after reading favourable reviews. Its sleek (fluxbox) and small (180MB) and pretty (KDE 3.3) but also bare (Read: no gcc, no mozilla)

vpn client on linux

Setup VPN to IDT: The CISCO VPN Client has issues with Kernel 2.6. This just hangs for ever and cannot even kill it. The machine does not even shutdown clean.

Used vpnc and works like a charm.

Added tun (required module for vpnc) to modules.preload file.

Tried adding IDT nameservers to resolv.conf at boottime (this file gets overwritten at each boot time by DHCP). No luck.

Issues: When connected to vpn, nameserver resolv does not work.