GNOME Bug Reported

http://crash.gnome.org/report/index/08926d08-ec60-11dd-89b6-0007e9333148?date=2009-01-27-10

gnome-netspeed applet

The GNOME NetSpeed monitor applet seems to be causing gnome-panel to suck up all the processor cycles.

Or maybe that's not it - CPU back up to 100% this time, and netspeed applet has been removed from panel.

gnome-screenshot

It would be nice if this applet had some user accessible settings and configuration; like:

* a default save path setting

* a default save name setting

* a default save name format/construction string setting

* a setting to allow the dialog popup to persist after the individual capture image is [saved or canceled]

Plasma of Death

Note that I recently (don't recall when, exactly, but it was earlier today, 25 Jan 2009) killed the plasma application that was ... well, that was part of the problem, I'm not sure what it was doing, but it was "Part of the Problem" on the KDE desktop.

The plasma just didn't seem stable.

... and it kept running while I was gone, too ...

Well, it looks like good news so far with the OpenSuSE 11.0+ Toshiba Satellite - oops, it dropped the wifi while I was out of the room, well, gotta get that back before this post will go thru! If you see this, you know we made it! Good Luck, and God Speed!

Posting again with GNOME Blogger Applet

Does this work? The machine has crashed the last few times I tried this...

gtk-chtheme

Gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme

I finally found the application I've been looking for to change the application fonts and colors in Mozilla Firefox.

I finally found this after letting KDE languish for a bit while I tried out a more recent version of the GNOME desktop environment. Note that I have been working at phasing out KDE in favor of the seemingly leaner, less resource-intensive GNOME.

Unfortunately, the problems have proven to be deeper than expected...

This blog post is yet another attempt to [re]post a post that has gotten lost a couple times now. I was using the GNOME Blogging widget to awhile ago when the entire machine [laptop] shut down unexpectedly for the 2nd time in an hour. I am still uncertain what caused it [the shutdown], but am currently running under KDE again - it's what came up when I selected the OpenSuSE "Failsafe" option in the GRUB menu.

The system is cruising along under KDE without noticeable system overload [yet - note that I am not currently running e.g. ACPI] and I'm concerned that there may have been some sort of truly evil device contention or kernel problems with Gtk/GNOME et al.

In any case, all that casts a bit of a cloud over what I had hoped would be Good News, so I'm just even very interested in tracking down that paint chip icon that I thought was so cool.

Also, note that the gtk-chtheme app does not look the same under KDE as it does under GNOME - where is the "Customize" option?

Xfce NetLoad monitor applet

Been looking all over for this one, and I find it now simply as a .desktop file [named netload.desktop].

The content of the file is shown here:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=No name
Name[en_US]=netload.desktop.txt

[Xfce Panel]
Type=X-XFCE-PanelPlugin
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Network Monitor
Comment=Show network traffic
Icon=xfce-mouse
X-XFCE-Exec=/usr/lib/xfce4-netload-plugin/xfce4/panel-plugins/xfce4-netload-plugin

Tech Talk

"But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge. Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge? What is a kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs, poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around? Have I explained yet about the bytes?"

Ongoing issues with OpenSuSE Interfaces

Narrowly missing the prime slot, KDE has bought the dust at last - with the [long-awaited] update to the KDE4 libs, the end was in sight - infrastructure rapidly disintegrating like a shatter of translucent glassine user space fluff.

Hmmm. Well, perhaps when it comes out of beta it will be worth another look.

The GNOME thingy, now. There's one that is worth some additional looking right now. The first major 'bug' I found was somewhat trivially solved, I think. It had something to do with 'gnome-settings-manager' software not being started, or not being able to start. All the information I found on the problem just seemed wrong (talking about deleting configuration directories and rebooting - yeah, I know, /rebooting/ ... under /linux/ yet... sheesh) anyway - I found out that if I just ran the program it seemed to actually run. The trick was that it - the program - the binary for this so-called 'gnome-settings-manager' is in an a place both ODD and WEIRD - a place called '/usr/lib/gnome-settings-manager/' - note that this is a place name only, and not the truename of the widgit)

The other interesting thing about this programita is that it does not run as root - that's right, friends, under this new, blue version of GNOME privacy/security/policy of True and Good and Just Governance, root doesn't get the $DISPLAY. So take /that/ all you big mean corporations...

In short I say to you my fellow ... uhm. Yeah. I say to you: just run the settings manager under your own UID at the shell prompt, or even at the Alt-F2 box. You lives will be easier, and the world a more Peaceful and User-Friendly place.

Problems with KDE, more problems with GNOME

While discussing installing Ubuntu recently, someone said to me "Do yourself a favor and install GNOME."

I did not accept this sage advice immediately, opting instead to continue to pursue my pipe dream of a glassy, midnight-hued desktop with all the latest Plasma widgets and functionality.

TikiWiki Install Problems on CentOS using cPanel and WHM

The enclosure, tikiwiki-install-msgs.txt, shows the messages I got in cPanel when I used Fantastico to install TikiWiki to my server at tiki.earthside.org ().

Initially, there was a configuration problem with the earthsid user account - the user name for the earthside.org domain account on the server - in that the user account did not have permission to create the MySQL database that TikiWiki uses.

Used the root account to give earthsid permissions on MySQL (and phpMyAdmin), but still getting the error:

Table 'earthsid_tiwi1.users_users' doesn't exist

I have removed and re-installed the TikiWiki package several times, including [most recently] after adding permissions to the user account. My reasoning was that, if the user did not have sufficient privileges on the database system, then the database tables could never be created at install time, assuming the installer is run by the [unprivileged] user.

Note also that the Fantastico control panel warns when attempts are made to install Fantastico packages on a user account while logged in as root. Therefore, I did not attempt to install TikiWiki as root...

In any case, I used phpMyAdmin to examine the database earthsid_tiwi1 (it did/does exist, and is shown in the phpMyAdmin interface for root), and there is no table called users_users, just as the message says...

Now, the problem is: I have not found a way to get to the TikiWiki login screen (as shown in the TikiWiki Documentation FOO) in order to log in and change the admin password.

St Francis Hospital, Columbus, GA

Posting from the St Francis Hospital public WiFi network.

Out-going connections appear to be limited to HTTP get requests. SSH and PING do not pass the firewall. An attempt to upload a screen capture image to Photobucket.com failed [time out].