Restore Settings on a Broken Firefox

When people have a problem with Firefox I’ve seen many people will resort to deleting their old profile (or folder) and creating a new one. This works, but doing this though will get rid of any passwords, history, bookmarks… you may have. I recently deleted the Microsoft fonts on my installation and Firefox began to display alot of site with monospace – thought I was still in vim :) . Having used Firefox quite a bit, getting a new profile was a good idea anyhow as cruft and buggy configs can slow down the browsing experience.

Details

First you’ll need to get to your Firefox configs:

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/

Backup your old profile and profile list:

mv xxxxxxxx.default{,.bck}
mv profiles.ini{,.bck}

Create a new profile:

firefox -CreateProfile <profilename>

This command will tell you the name of the new folder. Copy important information to the new profile:

cd *.default.bck
cp places.sqlite key3.db formhistory.sqlite signons3.txt persdict.dat content-prefs.sqlite ../*.<profilename>

This will transfer your bookmarks, browsing history, form entries, passwords, personal dictonary changes, and page zooms. There might be a couple other things you’d like to add (possibly your firefox preferences), take a look at Transferring data to a new profile.

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Keyboard Template

I needed a keyboard template and I couldn’t find any so I made one (uh kinda). The outline was made by aphasia100stock:

Notes

  • Converted from .ai format to .svg
  • Removed inner borders
  • Added Letters, Numbers, Symbols
  • Added guidelines to be able to reference keys.

Download svg

Thanks aphasia100stock for the outline.

Enjoy!

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Getting Help from Console

If you’re in console (aka virtual console) doing an install or repairs on a system, it’s good to know how to get help if problems occur.

“Ground Control…”

To get help in console you can use a chat client. Read this page on how to set up irssi – a terminal/console IRC program. The guide will walk you through setting up irssi and connecting to freenode where many Linux distribution chat channels are located.

“Waiting for details, Houston…”

When you tell the people in the chat-room what your problem is, sometimes they will need to know additional information. This could be the output of a command or the contents of a configuration file. To do a command without leaving irssi do Ctrl+Alt+F2 (F3, F4… can also be used) to enter another console, then enter the command.

Be better not to have to write everything down on a notepad and then type it into irssi, this is where it becomes useful to use a collaborative debugging tool like pastebin. Pastebin is a website that temporarily holds configurations, bug outputs… that you can refer other people to get help. There are several tools that can be used from the command line that can send files to a pastebin service, for example pastebinit. Add pastebinit from your distro, then upload a file. For example, your xorg.conf file:

pastebinit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

For uploading the output of a command, first you have to put it into a file:

fdisk -l &> partitions.txt

&> will redirect all output to a text file (both standard output and error output) and now it can be uploaded.

“I have visual…”

Occasionally you might need to actually show a picture of what your question is about (e.g. if you have a question about a console-based installer). For this you can use fbshot. fbshot is a framebuffer screenshot program. To take a screenshot of the first console (Ctrl+Alt+F1):

fbshot -c 1 console1.png

Then you can use links and a image-hosting website to upload the image.

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Customizable LiveUSB

If you ever have an emergency and need a rescue disk to recover your Linux install, or maybe you just want to brag to your friends there’s some good LiveCD/USB’s out there and many distro’s now make LiveUSB install images, but it is also possible to create your own customizable LiveUSB. Hey, if you’re willing to put the time in, you can have a portable Linux in your pocket.

There’s alot of articles about creating your own custom CD/LiveUSB but many of them seemed dramatic involving messing with things like syslinux… Plus many of these create a fixed image, meaning that once it’s on your USB it can’t be changed. But having a customizable Linux on a USB flashdrive isn’t that difficult – just install Linux to the USB drive.

Partition the USB Drive

The first thing you’ll need is at least a 2GB flash drive. Anything less and you better plan a real basic install. First thing you might like to do is partition the flash drive. This isn’t necessary but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need the 4GB for what I needed so I partitioned the flash drive to have a 1GB FAT32 partition first (so that Vista can see any files I put on it) then I partitioned the remaining 3GB as ext4 with kparted (there’s also gparted for gnome users).

Install via VirtualBox

No need to burn an ISO and reboot, use VirtualBox and do it from your desktop. You can follow my Testdrive a LiveCD with VirtualBox post to getting VirtualBox setup. I personally used Arch Linux for this install because it’s easy to configure, Gentoo should work well too, and Ubuntu looks to be easy.

Note: At the time VirtualBox does not have 64bit capabilities. If you want to install a 64bit Linux on your flash drive best to boot a LiveCD and follow these instruction from there.

Make sure your user is part of the VirtualBox group to enable usb recognition:

gpasswd -a <username> vboxusers

Boot the LiveCD/USB iso/img in VirtualBox then in Devices > USB devices select your flash drive. Now the installer will recognize your flash drive. Proceed to install the distro on the flash drive. If you partitioned beforehand you can skip partitioning and go to setting Filesystem Mountpoints. When you reach GRUB setup be sure to install GRUB on the flash drive itself, for me it was /dev/sdb. Be sure NOT to install GRUB to a partition, it should be at the beginning of the drive.

Fix Grub

Because your BIOS is likely setup to recognize your hard drive before your USB drive you get drive denominations like /dev/sda for your hard disk and /dev/sdb for your flash drive on regular bootup. If booting from a flash drive, many BIOS’s have you enter a key (mine is F10) to get to a Boot Menu. So when you select your flash drive in your BIOS Boot Menu your flash drive now becomes /dev/sda, hard drive /dev/sdb. In grub terminology this is hd0 and hd1. Most BIOS’s are like this (though there a few exceptions). To know for sure you won’t be able to detect this until you try and boot your flash drive (more below).

Close VirtualBox and open your GRUB menu list and change to the first recognized drive:

mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/usb
vim /mnt/usb/boot/grub/menu.lst

or however you edit your system files. Then change:

# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/34393cdf-9f39-431e-88c8-ea89a2518c83 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

to:

# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/34393cdf-9f39-431e-88c8-ea89a2518c83 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

The (hd0,1) value denotes the partition number, again starting with 0. So this denotation tells GRUB the root filesystem is on the first drive, second partition.

Arch-specific Details (Mostly)

If you already did the configuration for your hard disk, you should be able to copy most the configuation files over to the flash drive (rc.conf, mirrorlist, modprobe.conf, local.conf…) and then install xorg, xfce4… by chrooting in. This is my chroot script:

#!/bin/bash
# chrootmount – change root to current directory

cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/resolv.conf
mount -t proc none proc
mount -o bind /dev dev
mount -t sysfs none sys
chroot . /bin/bash
source /etc/profile
grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab
source ~/.bashrc

This will allow you to just cd to the mounted directory and enter command to chroot to the new environment. From there you can install a desktop environment (I choose XFCE because I wanted a lightweight environment and limited disk space):

pacman -Syu
pacman -S xorg xfce4 gdm <few-fonts> nvidia

And a couple other things following the Beginner’s Guide.

The kernel initramfs image will need to be rebuilt too to have usb driver support. In the chrooted environment edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and add usb to HOOKS:

HOOKS=”base udev autodetect pata scsi sata filesystems usb”

Then find the the kernel version name and version:

uname -r

and build a new initramfs image:

mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel26.img -k <your-kernel-name-version>

The -k option needs to be specified to use the chrooted kernel and not runtime kernel that is being used by chroot.

When done, exit chroot:

exit && umount proc sys dev

Reboot and Test

Now reboot and get to the BIOS Boot Menu. As I said, all BIOS’s are different so keep an eye for a key to get to it. Once in the Boot Menu select your USB drive.

Try and boot the flash drive. If you get a GRUB 17 error or boot into hard drive OS, you’ll have to edit your menu.lst. You can find the devices Grub sees by starting the flash drive again and in the Grub menu press e to edit. On the root line press e again and delete to:

root (hd

now press tab and it will show you the availble drive and partitions. Enter the correct one, hit escape and then b to boot. That’s it, you should now have your own customizable Linux USB drive.

Troubleshooting

If you get errors loading the kernel, it may be because USB device detection may need a delay before loading root. Try to add this to the end of your kernel line in your menu.lst:

rootdelay=8

Conclusion

I was a bit surprised. I didn’t think a USB drive would be much different that a CD/DVD but actually it was alot faster. And I just discovered that I’m using a USB 1.1 flash drive. :) Not quite as quick as my hard drive but definitely not bad. This is also the first time I ran without an xorg.conf and my desktop runs great. Definitely worth a try if you ever need a rescue os to fix problems with.

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Vim Basics

Note: This is not mine! I don’t want to be harrassed, sued, or have kittens thrown at me. This great piece I luckily stumbled upon when I was first trying to learn vim. The original piece was part of the original Gentoo Wiki. Because the archive does not have information on the author, I am writing this without his permission. If you are the author please email and tell me what you think. This piece has been slightly editing for clarification.

Introduction

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor ‘Vi’, with a more complete feature set. Vim is not a simple text editor like nano or pico. It does require some time to learn, and a great amount of time to master.

About Vim

Vim is probably the most popular incarnation of its predecessor vi, but all vi packages are similar.

Vim is designed to make your fingers work as little as possible, and you should never have to use the mouse. This may seem odd, but once you master Vim, you’ll wonder why other apps don’t behave like it.

Features

  • Vim has syntax highlighting.
  • No-nonsense editor
  • Command mode allows for simple, robust keybindings
  • Vim is very powerful for advanced editing tasks
  • vimtutor is a vim-based tutorial to learn… indeed… vim
  • Uh…vim is good?

Starting Vim

If you start vim with vim somefile.txt you’ll see a blank document (providing that somefile.txt does not exist. If it does, you’ll see what’s in there). You will not be able to edit right away – you are in Command Mode. In this mode you are able to issue commands to vim with the keyboard.

Note: Vim is an example of classic UNIX-style ware. This means that its not flashy, and it won’t hold your hand. It doesn’t come with built-in paperclips and games. It will allow you to get the job done however, and quickly too. Also, all commands are case sensitive. Sometimes the uppercase versions are “blunter” versions (s will replace a character, S will replace a line), other times they are completely different commands (j will move down, J will join two lines).

Let’s work on something. It can be any text file, really. Open that file with vim:

vim foo.txt

Basic Editing

You begin in command mode. If you’re not sure what mode you’re in, press ESC to get to command mode.

You insert text (stick it before the cursor) with the i command. I inserts text at the end of the line. You append text (place text after the cursor, what most people expect) with a. Typing A will place the cursor at the end of the line.

Return to command mode at any time by pressing ESC.

Moving Around

Single Characters

In Vim, you can move the cursor with the arrow keys, but that’s no very efficient is it? You’d have to move your right hand all the way from the standard typing position all the way to the arrow keys, and then back. Not fun.

In vi you can move down by pressing j. You can remember this because the “j” hangs down. You move the cursor back up by pressing k. Left is h (its left of the “j”), and right is l (its right of the “k”).

^ will put the cursor at the beginning of the line, and $ will place it at the end.

^ and $ are commmonly used in regular expressions to match begin and end of the line. Regular expressions are very powerfull and are commonly used in *nix environment, so maybe it is a little bit tricky now, but later you will notice “the idea” behind most of the key mappings. Other commands also use ^ and $ to move/do something from cursor to begin or end of the line.

Multiple Characters

To advance a word, press the w key. W will include more characters in what it thinks is a word. To go back a word, b is used. Once again, B will include more characters in what vim considers a word. To advance to the end of a word, use e. If you haven’t guessed it, E includes more characters to be a word.

To advance to the beginning of a sentence, ( will get the job done. ) will do the opposite, moving to the end of a sentence. For an even bigger jump, { will move the the begining a whole paragraph. } will advance to the end of a whole paragraph.

To advance to the header (top) of the screen, H will get the job done. M will advance to the middle of the screen, and L will advance to the last (bottom).

The repetition department of the repetition department of the…

Here’s an awesome thing: if you press a number before a command, then that command will be executed that number of times over (there are exceptions, but they still make sense, like the s command). For example, pressing 3i then “Help! ” will print “Help! Help! Help!“. Pressing 2} will advance you two paragraphs. This comes in handy with the next few commands…

Deleting

The x command will delete the character under the cursor. X will delete the character before the cursor. This is where those number functions get fun. 6x will delete 6 characters. Pressing . (dot) will repeat the previous command. So, lets say you have the word foobar in a few places, but after thinking about it, you’d like there just to be “foo”. Move the cursor under the b, hit 3x, move to to the next foo bar and hit . (dot). BAM!

The d will tell Vim that you want to delete something. After pressing d, you need to tell Vim what to delete. Here you can use the movement commands. dW will delete up to the next word. d^ will delete up unto the beginning of the line. Prefacing the delete command with a number works well too: 3dW will delete the next three words. D (uppercase) is a shortcut to delete until the end of the line (basically d$). Pressing dd will delete the whole line.

Undo and Redo

vim has a built-in cutboard. Actions and be undone and again redone. Use u to undo and ctrl+r to redo.

Advanced Editing

Pressing s will erase the current letter under the cursor, and place you in edit mode. S will erase the whole line, and place you in edit mode. Pressing 5s will erase 5 letters and place you in edit mode.

Pressing v will put you in visual mode . Here you can move around to select text, when you’re done, you press y to yank the text into the buffer (copy), or you may use c to cut. p pastes after the cursor, P pastes before. V, Visual Line mode, is the same for entire lines. c^v is for blocks of text.

Note: Whenever you delete something, that something is placed inside your buffer and is available for pasting.

Search and Replace

To search for a word or character in the file, simply use / and then the characters your are searching for and press enter (e.g. /myword). To view the next match in the search press n.

To search and replace use the substitute :s/ command. The syntax is: [range]s//]/[arguments]. Some examples:

Command Outcome
:s/xxx/yyy/ Replace xxx with yyy at the first occurence
:s/xxx/yyy/g Replace xxx with yyy global (whole sentence)
:s/xxx/yyy/gc Replace xxx with yyy global with confirm
:%s/xxx/yyy/g Replace xxx with yyy global in the whole file

You can use the global :g/ command to search for patterns and execute a command for each hit. The syntax is: :[range]:g//[cmd]. Some examples:

Command Outcome
:g/^#/d Delete all lines that begins with #
:g/^$/d Delete all lines that are empty

To replace the current word. Place the cursor on the word and execute the command cw. This will delete the word and change the mode to “input”. To replace a letter use r.

Other things

Vim will auto indent. This can be annoying when you have to paste something that contains a space or tab at the beginning of the line. In command mode typing :set paste will disable this. Typing :set nopaste will reenable it.

Saving and Quitting

Write a file with :w or if the file doesn’t have a name :w <filename.txt>. Quitting done with :q. If you choose not to save your changes, use :q!. To save and quit :x.

Using Tabs

If you want to edit multiple documents at once you can use tabs to make it easier:

vim -p <document 1> <document 2>…

Configuration File

vim is ultimably customizable and can be used for many different program languages, personal perferences… and is done so in the configuration file. There’s alot you can do in a .vimrc file, for new users here’s a basic one:

.vimrc

Place in your home directory.

Conclusion

You now know how to use Vim to do slightly more than you could do in a simple editor. As your knowledge of Vim grows, you will be able to use it highly efficiently and do amazing things with text files. And most importantly, you’ll feel right at home playing nethack.

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Testdrive a LiveCD with VirtualBox

Results will vary depending on your machine but it may be quicker to burn and reboot to testdrive a LiveCD. If you want to try VirtualBox though, this is how you do it.

I decided to take a look at Fedora 11 and I thought that if I wanted to take a look at other LiveCDs in the future may as well set up VirtualBox and save myself the time of burning and restarting to take the look at them. Virtualbox is a bit slow but not terribly though. Note: I don’t have virtualization on my CPU though so load-times may alot better with it.

Install VirtualBox

Virtualbox has been getting some good reviews and is easy to use. Locate you distro’s documentation and find out how to do this.

Once Virtualbox has been installed load the module:

modprobe vboxdrv

Start VirtualBox

VirtualBox in the KDE menu is under System > Sun VirtualBox, or you can just type VirtualBox in a terminal.

Setup

Click ‘New’ in the VirtualBox window, name it, select OS type and version. Select base memory size as 512MB (most operating systems will need at least 512MB to function properly). Follow the rest of the steps to create a hard disk image.

When the new image has been created click ‘Settings’ then CD/DVD-ROM and check ‘Mount CD/DVD Drive’. Then add the ISO image.

In the ‘General’ dialogue, select the Advance tab and check ‘Enable IO APIC’.

That’s it. You should now be able to load a LiveCD from VirtualBox.

Going Further

I wrote a post on top of this about creating you own LiveUSB:

Customizable LiveUSB

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Kcheckgmail Gets in the KDE 4 Door

There are several programs to get mail notifications in the notification tray in KDE 4 but up until now there have been no native KDE ones: cgmail, and gnubiff rely alot on Gnome. There is the emailnotify plasmoid which isn’t too shabby but I wanted my notifications in the notification area!

Popular KDE 3 applications are making their way gradually to KDE 4 and kcheckgmail just made that plunge. So thanks to the devs that got this done.

Kcheckgmail for KDE 4 would still be considered beta software though as I encountered a couple bugs setting it up. After setup though kcheckgmail has been running good the last few days.



For now if you want to use kcheckgmail you’ll have to compile it from git. Luis has the basic instructions on how to do this.

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Upgrading Your Video Card – Part 2

Continued from Part 1. Now that you got your card and PSU there’s couple more things to know.

Linux Drivers

It’s best to add your new video card drivers before you shut down so your new card will just boot up to the deskotp. Remove your old driver and install the new. Don’t try to keep both drivers as they’d probably conflict. Don’t worry about uninstalling a video driver on a running system, the driver is stored in memory so this is no problem to do.

BIOS

For newer BIOS’s this isn’t a problem. On mine I had a video setting that by default said “PCI Express First’ so I didn’t have to change anything. The card was recognized at boot and the BIOS disabled the onboard one automatically. Most BIOS’s have this option. You may have to change this yourself though so look into your BIOS before booting.

Post Boot

If everything is set up correctly, you should have your new video card up and running. In the terminal type:

lspci | grep VGA

and you should see your new card. With that you can try out a game or an HD movie and see how it does.

Overclock

There’s alot of talk in the video card click of overclocking. My advice? Don’t! Sure you can if you want to but keep in mind that overclocking voids most warranties. Overclocking can also take years off a video cards lifetime. Plus even the greatest overclocks will usually only yield about 2-4 fps. If you need more fps than that then likely you need another video card. If you absolutely have to do it, there’s a good post in the nvidia forums (see third post down).

Budget for a Price

I decided to go with the nvidia PNY 9600 GSO 768MB card. This isn’t a good card for gamers (be careful of manufacturer-reviews) but it is good for the price I got it for. I picked this up at Fry’s for $40 after a mail-in rebate. It’s runs quiet and has a three year warranty to boot. I tested a few games and found out it ran decent on most new games on medium settings (Crysis plays 20-40fps). I found out a bit too late but if you want a good budget/gamer card you’re gonna have to begin at the $100 price range and I’ve heard alot of good things about the ATi 4770.

My PSU

This PSU is a great buy for the money as I said before though if you want to be sure you got a good PSU spend $40 dollars or more. As it was though, I couldn’t afford it and took a chance on a bargain PSU that has gotten some good reviews. The hec HP485D 485W ATX12V Power Supply installed easily and seems to be doing ok (I just hope it holds out for more that a year :) )

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Upgrading Your Video Card

I’ve been using my built-in nvideo 7050 video card for a while now and for a built-in card it’s pretty good. I get decent compositing and Urban Terror plays around 30 frames per second but I’ve come to realize that I just want to be able to do more: play better games, watch HD video… so I decided to update my video card and now I’m amazed at what it can do. If you’re thinking about upgrading yours, this is what I learned from mine.

Note: This guide focuses on modernish hardware and on nvidia video cards. I’m not biased or anything, it’s just that my built-in nvidia worked so well, and that nvidia does a great job supporting Linux, that I decided to go with nvidia again.

Digging in the Pockets

Yeah that $200 dollar top-of-the-line video card looks cool, but most of us don’t wanna spend dollars like that for something we use a couple hours of the day. Video cards can be pricey but even on a modest budget you can get a decent card a good step up from a built-in one. Good $40-80 cards can be found that can easily double frame rates and help you play new or newer games. Save yourself a little budget for a power supply too as video cards take a good amount of wattage and many stock desktops only provide power for the components involved. With $100 (minus $20-40 in rebates) you can get a fifth tier video card and a power supply to go with it.

Whats Your Motherboard Got?

Pop open your hood to see what you got (or if you’re lucky enough you’ll have an owners manual that tells you). In most recent desktops for the last few years are PCI Express slots and are very good for video cards. If you have an AGP or PCI even these can have cards added that can help improve performance. For the purpose of this upgrade I’ll be talking about PCI Express.

A PCI Express slot will look something like this (see bottom of page). If you’re not sure, look closely at the motherboard. Alot of motherboards print a small label like PCIE next to the slot. If you got that, you’re good to go. This could be either a PCI Express 1.0 or 2.0 slot. 2.0 slots add alot of bandwidth but at this time no video card is really able to take advantage of it. You also don’t need to worry about what PCI Express version video card you buy either as 2.0 is backward-compatible with 1.0.

Queen of Hearts – Picking the Right Card

To pick a good nvidia card, nvidia appends their card versions with a couple letters. The version tells the capabilites of the card (OpenGL 2.1, DirectX10…) while the lettering indicated performance. GS cards are clocked the lowest, GT is middle, GTS is high, and GTX is extremely high. For example the 9500 GT is nvidia’s last generation card with medium performance. A good place to compare video card performance is Tom’s hardware’s video card hierarchy page (includes nvidea and ATI).

It’s pretty hard to go wrong with any of top level video card but a word of warning: not all branded video cards are alike. Because third party companies assemble the components together you will occasionally see a components that are skimped on. I’ve seen a number of poor reviews on what normally should be a pretty good video card. I get alot of my reviews at newegg. Newegg offers good prices on alot of different cards and they have a customer review section for each product, so most of the reviews are pretty up front. Compare the card with different vendors that offer the same branded product to be sure you’re getting all you should.

A couple things I noticed comparing vender cards was that some of them offer a good number less stream processors and others would use old memory chips. There can be any kind of cavaets like this so keep your eyes open. Memory isn’t terribly expensive these days and you should at least try to find something with DD3 or above.

The amount of memory you choose is important too. I had one person tell me that 512 MB of memory is the sweat spot, that you would never really use more than that. But when I tried Crysis on my 756 MB graphic card, it almost maxed it out. Memory on the video card is almost directly proportional to the resolution. I have a 1440×900 resolution which isn’t the biggest so if you have something bigger you might want to consider a 1 GB card. Memory spills over to the computer memory but it’s better if it’s kept on the card.

Another thing to consider when getting a video card is what type of outlets it has. Most newer cards have two DVI’s and a HDTV outlets (and sometimes svideo).

Fire and Brimstone (or Noise, Heat, and Size)

If you looked over some video cards already you’ve noticed how big some of them look. Unfortunately most video card specifications don’t have measurements listed. When there’s not alot of space by your PCI Express slot look at the reviews and see if anyone else had trouble getting them in. If they did you should look for a low-profile card. Or you might wanna take a chance and try to put one in – most manufacturers are good about taking back such products.

Think about just how hot your card may get too. The high-powered cards available have a good size fan on them but that fan isn’t going to do alot of good if your computer case has hardly any vents. A card that gets too hot is gonna have a much shorter life span.

One of the most common gripes I read in the reviews about video cards was how that some of them sounded like a helicopter taking off. Yeah these cards get pretty hot and your bargain basement versions don’t put alot of money into quiet fans. If you think a constant buzz is gonna bother you after awhile you may have to look into a more expensive card with a better fan or a card with less performance.

9/10 Ladies Prefer the Graphic Man

If you anticipate you’re going to need a real workhorse of a computer, and you got the extra slot for it, remember SLI. SLI is Nvidia’s technology that allows graphic cards to work in parallel process to one another (ATI’s is called Crossfire). To utilize this technology though you’ll need a an nvidia motherboard 680i or greater and a supported PSU.

Power Supply (PSU) and Cables

No shying off it, almost everyone is gonna have to get one. It’s not fun to have to pay the extra cost of another PSU but I can tell you they are fun to put in. Do yourself a favor and don’t think you might just get by. If a PSU gets overtaxed it will shut down your computer or possibly even worse things. And don’t listen to what the video card recommendations say, alot of times they just give an estimate and have no idea what you are running in your computer. Newegg has a PSU calculator that will give you a good idea what you need.

Now check what cable connections you need. Unplug your box (all external connections), destatic by touching the frame, and trace all your PSU connections. You’ll probably need at least these: 2 SATA power (one for hard drive another for DVD/CD), one main power (motherboard) 24 pin connector, a 4 pin CPU power cord, and a 6 pin PCI-Express cable. The 6 pin PCI-Express cable isn’t a big deal as most cards include a dual-molex to 6 pin adapter and most PSU’s have at least 4 molex cables. For the motherboard cable almost all new ones have a 24 pin slot, the PSU’s though (to be compatible with older motherboards) have 20 and 4 pin cables that can be snapped together. When you look to buy make sure the cables are long enough. SATA plugs are often put on one wire several inches apart, are your components close enough together?

Someone in the know posted in a forum that for a good video card you’re gonna want 30 amps on the rails. I couldn’t get more information on this but I’m pretty sure he meant that you want 30 Amps delivered to your video card. One molex cable on my power supply has 16A and another has 17A they plug into the dual-molex adapter that in turn plugs into the video card. I’ve played games for several hours at a time and haven’t had any problems.

Also look to be sure that you have the necessary room for a larger PSU. I wasn’t expecting it but the unit I bought was a good inch deeper than the original and made for a tight fit.

Real cheap PSU’s start around $15 dollars but you might be able to find a good enough one for a basic system at $20. Most people recommend though that you look for PSU’s beginning at the $40 price range.

Conclusion

This is my first time buying a video card so if I messed something up or missed anything important, let me know!

Configuring the BIOS, Linux and a good budget video card are in Upgrading Your Video Card Part 2.

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Webkit browsers on their way to Linux but not there yet

Firefox really shocked up the browser wars when it released version 3.0. The more I use it the more I realize what a great browser it is. When Firefox first released 3.0 it was full-steam ahead. Soon we heard about a new javascript engine and it seemed like 3.1 would be just on the horizon. Then something happened and the Firefox locomotive haltingly put it’s breaks on. 3.1 was delayed indefinitely and a horrible exploit bug was discovered. Firefox also stopped working the my hotmail account (probably more a problem with hotmail). While Firefox gets things back on track, I decided it was a good time to try the new web browser rendering engine Webkit.

Webkit in General

Webkit is a rendering engine based on KHTML (KHTML is KDE’s Konquerer’s rendering engine) that has been radically modified by Apple for their web browser Safari. Because Webkit has received a good amount of development it will probably replace KHTML in KDE soon.

Rekonq

Rekonq is an effort to replace KHTML with Webkit in Konquerer. One of the first things you’ll notice about Webkit is that it renders pages really fast. This could be because that it’s new but from my tests Webkit seems to be able to render anything that Firefox can. Not only that but Webkit renders web pages beautifully.

Still in it’s early stages, Rekonq doesn’t add many configurations yet: saved passwords, minimum font size, saved tabs… And with qt’s version of Webkit redirects dont’ work yet.

Arora

Arora has been in development longer than Rekonq and has a few more configurations. It includes privacy settings, tab session savings, proxy…

Arora’s a good browser that’s coming along nicely. If I were to gripe about anything of Arora is that it does a big no by forcing a default font so that web pages just don’t look the way they should.

Chromium

Googles’ new browser Chrome also uses Webkit but was originally designed for Windows. Thankfully though Google had the good graces to open-source the project and very early Linux builds are being made. I didn’t get a chance to try Chromium yet. As development has centered on developing Chrome 32 bit no version is available for my 64 bit machine. And it looks like I may not being trying Chromium soon either as developing a 64 bit version will require mounting some pretty big bumps. I did try cxchromium though (an altered version of Chrome design to run under wine) and I did get an idea what they are trying to do. I like the modular tabs that seperate different webpages and http boxes nicely. Also I like all-in-one http box that can be used for searchs, previously visited sites, and bookmarks.

Update: thinkMoult Has a good guide on Chromium and has found a way to run Chromium on 64 bit systems.

Midori

Midori I’m going to label as the current champ of Linux Webkit browsers. It’s able to save tabs, has a minimum font size setting, works with flash nicely, and has the ability to page zoom. Midori uses GTK and appears to be progressing nicely:

Midori may be the first real Firefox alternative in Linux. Hopefully they’ll fix the same error that Arora makes by forcing a default font.

Epiphany

Awhile back Epiphany made the committment to switch from Gecko (Firefox’s default rendering engine) to Webkit. Unfortunately development has been slow and didn’t make it into Gnome 2.26. Looking at the newest version though it looks about ready.

Epiphany updated it’s http box too to behave more like Firefox’s awesome bar does and it’s a nice touch. Again this browser forces a default font and configurability is limited. Epiphany though for the most part runs great on lower-end machines.

Leader of the Pack

I thought about switching to another web browser because i use KDE and would just prefer it that way. I can say that I was pretty close. From my tests Webkit could render anything Firefox did as good or better. And flash worked good with all of them for the most part. None of these browsers though recognized the java plugin. While I’m sure there’s a hack out there, I didn’t really want make a hack and try to remember how to erase it later. Mostly why I didn’t leave Firefox is that there are some great things about Firefox that are hard to leave behind. First, the awesome bar is well…awesome. Not only can I find previously viewed webpages easily, but also I can find webpages that I visited long ago plus the awesome bar does it quickly. I also find that I use web page zooming in Firefox quite a bit. Just because how some web pages choose their font sizes, reading a long article with small fonts can be a strain on the eye. Firefox not only zooms the entire page but it also remembers the settings so that next time I go back there I don’t have to do it again.

No I don’t think I’ll be migrating away from Firefox anytime soon but I don’t think a good Webkit browser is too far off on the horizon.</p

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Desktop… Phht

I don’t post screenshots usually because they just don’t get my attention. If i’m able to get things done then it doesn’t matter if i’m with AIG or on Gilligan’s Island. On my desktop, I don’t have fancy spinning-cubes, fire-drawing cursors, or wallpapers that leave a negative image floating on the back of my retina. What i do got is a desktop that would hopefully make Bender’s God happy :) :

Details:

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