Customising the eeepc

Here's what I did

• Disabled samba and portmapper by commenting them out of /usr/sbin/services.sh. Tried just commenting out their start methods in init.d, but services calls start-stop daemon directly for portmapper. Didn't want to actually uninstall in case I want them later where there is no inet access.
  
• Disabled cups auto-discovery off (Browing Off in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf) because it requires a process listening on the network.
  
• Changed computer hostname using kcontrol
  
• Connect to my home wireless automatically on boot.
  
• Changed screensaver to lock after a few seconds.
  
• Added in extra apt package sources and installed openarena - awesome.
  

Doing incremental reveal in Open Office Impress

I like doing presentations with incremental reveal on my points, where one point comes up on the screen for each mouse click. Powerpoint calls this something like 'animate by 1st level paragraph'. To get this to work in open office impress:

• Click on your text box, then custom animation in the task pane on the right hand side
  
• Click Add...
  
• Select Appear
  
• Right click the animation that appears in the box and select Effect Options...
  
• On the Text Animation tab, choose 'Group Text: By 1st level paragraphs'
  

So intuitive! I couldn't get it to apply to all slides by doing this to the master so I just did it to one slide then used 'Duplicate Slide'.

Well done to both Powerpoint and OO for making it easy to do all sorts of distracting and stupid flying animations but hiding useful features under a maze of configuration.

HOWTO Install OpenOffice Dictionaries

If you don't have dictionaries installed OpenOffice will do a spellcheck and tell you there were no errors. Not exactly the best result - it should say it doesn't have any dictionaries installed. To install openoffice dictionaries go to:

File|Wizards|Install new dictionaries...

RPM Links and HOWTO

• The general HOWTO.
  
• Explanation of the built-in macros and how to configure with ~/.rpmmacros
  

If you have a change to the original source you need to make:

cp -r package-1.3.2 package-1.3.2p
make change in package-1.3.2p
diff -uNr package-1.3.2/ package-1.3.2p/ > ../SOURCES/package-1.3.2-my.patch

and add a Patch line to the spec file.

Vmware won't compile on Hardy

Vmware server and workstation are both currently broken on the kernel version in Hardy. You need to install a patch to get them to compile. Vmware server also requires xinetd. I changed

/etc/xinetd.conf

to force all services to only listen on localhost with

 bind            = 127.0.0.1

Not only that, but vmware-server-console is busted too!

/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)

Fix it with

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0
sudo ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1

Awesome article on VMWare detection and mitigation

Great article on how to detect VMWare, and how to prevent detection using undocumented VMX settings. Written by Ed Skoudis and Tom Liston from SANS.

Hardy usability downgrade: CD media removed from "Removable Drives and Media"

Argh! The option to prevent Audio CDs from being played automatically has been removed from System | Preferences | Removable Drives and Media. Why? It is so annoying to have Rhythmbox fire up when I just want to copy a CD. The preference is now hidden in the super intuitive place of Edit | Preferences | Media Tab in the Nautilus file manager.