Cookies don’t work on explorer 7 when you use an underscore within your domain. For us this was the case for some local develop address “domain_php5.local”. It only took my colleague a day to figure it out…

As underscores arn’t valid for hostnames, this problem mostly occurs within local networks. Solution: change the hostname.

Meuk

Bluetooth errors

Bluetooth is not working. This gives a lot of errors on boot after you fixed the problem described second (No screen after installation) and might make the terminal not usable.

Error message: hci_cmd_timer: hci0 command tx timeout

For this, disable bluetooth in the bios(F2 on boot). I have not found a fix for this yet.

No screen after installation

When the installation completed I rebooted and Debian started into white snow screen, even on tty1. Starting Debian single-user mode didn’t fix anything, so clearly this wasn’t related to gdm3 that get’s started. After adding the option radeon.modeset=0 to the single-user option within grub (edit can be enabled by pressing key e), debian booted succesfully to the terminal.

After that I installed the open-source radeon drivers as described on the following url:
http://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo
Note that you need to add non-free to your repository. Read carefully.

After adding the proper xorg.conf lines I rebooted and voila I had screen!

No wifi in gnome network-manager

I couldn’t find wlan0 within gnome’s network-manager. I fixed this by removing wlan0 from /etc/network/interfaces, which the installation added for downloading packages. After removing this and rebooting, network-manager will recognize wlan0.

If you installed without wifi, this problem won’t occur.

Note: For wifi without working with a graphical interface, you need to re-add the lines to /etc/network/interfaces.

Errors within daemon log

I noticed some errors on tty2 which were also logged within /var/log/daemon.log

Error message: init: Id “co” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I’m not sure what this is but commented out line following line within file /etc/inittab: co:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty hvc0 9600 linux

That stopped reporting the message. I’m not sure what effect this will have though. If anyone know, please comment!

Touchpad scrolling not working

The touchpad is recognized as a generic mouse. /proc/bus/input/devices reports: “PS/2 Generic Mouse”. I haven’t found a fix for this yet. Have to live whitout scrolling for now.

———————

The laptop runs very well. For now I’ll have to deal with bluetooth and scrolling not working but I can live with that.

Hope this helped you as a reader! If you have tips or more information on remaining issues. Please post a comment!

Let me explain….

I’m using dual screen for both work and personal use. I’ve used the gnome-panel (which has similar functionality to Windows) on both screens to track the programs that run. I really loved the fact the the running programs of the second screen, actually are on the second gnome-panel taskbar. This gives a less bloated main taskbar. After using this setup for a while, I started noticing i’m very restless while working with this setup. This is due to the fact I got very distracted by all the  panels and information within. I stopped getting a fast overview of all the applications i’m running, even when using a fixed workspace layout I can remember. Thus I started to get chaotic. I’ll try to give you an example:

I have gedit (text editing) running on workspace 1. On workspace 2 I have my terminal running and need to store some text temporarily. I go back to workspace 1 and can’t find gedit open and am too lazy to search the taskbar panel at the bottom or hit ALT TAB. So I switch back to workspace 2 and hit RUN → gedit. There you have it, I got gedit running twice. There were times that almost all my workspaces had gedit running while it wasn’t really needed. I could of just switched workspaces whitout searching. But how?

Time for change.

Let me introduce you to the following applications which I got running at the moment to give me the perfect desktop, that solves all my frustration:

This is based on Gnome, but should work on all environments!

Gnome-do (http://do.davebsd.com)

Know quicksilver of OSX? You know what to expect. Gnome-do is a graphical shell for your desktop by providing a very fast way of launching applications. Need Firefox? Press SUPER + SPACE, type ‘fire’ and hit ENTER. Done! Firefox is running So goodbye to all your shortcuts. A very important app to work faster!

Compiz fusion (http://www.compiz.org)

Compiz is an OpenGL compositing manager. It has some nice fancy effects that seem to be just eye candy, but with the right use of it, you can work much faster and enjoy your desktop. For installing compiz, please refer to your local distro information:

Debian:    http://wiki.debian.org/Compiz
Ubuntu:    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompositeManager/CompizFusion
Arch:        http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Compiz

Make sure to be installing the extra-plugins also, because one of the plugins i mention down here is part of this package! Within most distro’s it will be a package called compiz-fusion-plugins-extra.

Let’s take a look at the plugins I’ve got enabled:

Desktop Wall

OSX like workspace switching. (CTRL ALT). Trust me, you don’t want the fancy Cube like you see on most compiz setups. This works so much faster!

There’s one more neat thing to set up. Within Compiz settings go to: General Options –> Desktop size. Set both Horizontal and Virtual size to 2. This gives you the ability to easily switch from workspace 1 to 4 and vice versa.

Widget layer

Hold’s widgets. Within this layer you can hold screenlets like a calculator and calender.

Screenlets have to be installed separately. It’s in most package managers but it’s really a matter of taste if you would to use all these ‘gadgets’. The Widget Layer itself must be installed because it will be very usefull later on this article!

When adding a widget, right click it and choose Window –> Dock. This will make it switch to your Widget Layer.

Window Decoration

Windows just look a bit better.

Animations

Window animations. I changed the Minimize Animation to Glide 2.

Screenshot

Take selection screenshots very easy with SUPER + LEFT MOUSE.

Application Switcher

Good old ALT TAB functionality.

Ring Switcher

Good overview of the running applications (Graphical ALT TAB alternative). Can be activated with SUPER + TAB.

Expo

Creates an expo of all your workspaces. By default this can be toggled by going to the upper left corner with your mouse or hit SUPER + E.

Wallpaper

Allows you to set a different wallpaper on each Workspace to visually remind you where you are. With this feature enabled, icons on your desktop can’t be rendered anymore. For people like me, who have to clean up their desktop a lot, it’s actually no downside and a good way of getting rid of this chaotic habbit of storing temp files on the desktop. Thanks to Emery‘s comment for this.

Move Window

Move windows with ALT + F7 or ALT + MOUSE1.

After succesfully setting up Compiz, we can enable the other software which make us work faster and thus be more productive. Docky!

Docky

Update 2010-11-02
It seems docky got separated from gnome-do on my debian squeeze installation, so possibly on other distributions too. If the information below does not work for you, please install docky separated through your favorite package manager or download at https://launchpad.net/docky.

OSX got this great functionality called a dock. Luckily for us, this can be done on Linux too! A dock can replace your task panels completely and works much faster because you only have to recognize application icons instead of reading your bloated gnome-panel. For this feature you need to have Compiz and gnome-do both working. To enable this, go to the gnome-do settings and change the theme under Appearance to Docky.

When enabled docky, you’ll notice that do (SUPER + SPACE) has intergrated into the dock!

Let’s clean up!

Next thing you should do is hiding all your gnome-panels. (If you havn’t already did so). This can be done by right clicking them and choose Delete This Panel. Though there is one panel you can’t get rid of that easily, which is the main gnome-panel with the application menu etc. Auto hiding isn’t a perfect solution. What I’ve done is hide the panel by using the Widget Layer within Compiz. Under the Behaviour tab of the Widget Layer settings add the following to Widget Windows:

(class=Gnome-panel & type=Dock)

This makes the panel hide within the Widget layer, which can be enabled with F9. When your main panel isn’t hiding, try a re-login within gnome.

Little problems can be fixed easily!

The only problem I encountered after setting up this environment was the fact that I didn’t have a tray anymore for my Pidgin IM client, which I used to see if anyone messaged me. I solved this by installing the libnotify plugin for Pidgin. This will give nice notification balloons when there’s a incoming message. Most distributions should have this in their repositories by default!

Try to find a fix similar to this for your applications. Ofcourse you can always fall back to the old tray by activating the Widget Layer (F9).

New Desktop and Conclusion

Wondering how my desktop looks like when idle?

Wallpaper link

When not idle it isn’t that much different, just some extra icons at the bottom and open windows. No taskbars!

Back to gedit… Forgot where you put it? Don’t feel bad for not using your workspace switch shortcut, use your mouse to click gedit from the dock and it will switch to the proper Workspace with the window open.

Is’nt all of this just awsome?

The fact..

• that panels arn’t distracting me from work
• i can start applications whitout going through the application menu
• i can access the applications i somehow lost very quickly
• i have a 2×2 desktop wall
• the desktop is very responsive and (usefull) animated
• i have much more space for my windows

is a salvation.

Installing is believing….

Thanks for reading!

This can be fixed by editing the following file:
/etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.con

You should see the follow setting:
net.ipv6.bindv6only = 1
change this to:
net.ipv6.bindv6only = 0

Restart your system and your apps should be functioning properly again.

It took me several hours to find this solution, so I hope posting another article helps other people in search of a solution.

Thanks for reading.

Installing a new browser can be done through your favorite package manager (apt-get or aptitude).

Changing your default browser within debian is quite easy. Just use the the following command and follow the instructions:
update-alternatives –config x-www-browser

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Debian uses gij/OpenJDK as default java implementation. If you want to switch to sun’s java, you need to install it. Make sure you have the non-free repository added to your sources.list. You can add this by editing your /etc/apt/sources.list and put non-free behind your repositories.

Next we will install java. These examples use aptitude, but apt-get should be similar.
JRE:
aptitude install sun-java6-jre
JDK (development):
aptitude install sun-java6-jdk

To change the default java. Use the following code:
update-alternatives –config java

Thanks for reading.

This problem mostly has to do with different encodes of text. It’s very hard to covert an euro sign with a hard “€” within your replace code. I came across this problem a lot of times. This website covers the euro sign regarding different codes on different platforms.

I found using the chr function can be very successful. The following code has proven itself to be work on different websites to replace a euro signs within a String:
$string = str_replace(chr(128), ‘EUR’,$string);

Thanks for reading.

There are a lot of topics about OSX and NFS to find on the internet, but most of them did not help us a lot on this subject while they do claim to improve OSX mounting on different subjects, which they actually did for previous problems we had. On this article we just focus on our problem described above and the fix we used. I can’t guaranty it will work with other configurations.

Server side NFS configuration:
Debian Lenny
Kernel 2.6.26-2-686

NFS /etc/exports:
/mnt/raiddata 192.168.1.0/24(rw,insecure,insecure_locks,no_subtree_check,root_squash, all_squash,anonuid=1000,anongid=1000)

As you can see there are a lot of options in place. This is a result of previous problems with Locked files, Write permissions etc. These server side options fixed that. This might be the cause of the problem we’re covering right now.

The OSX client fixing
We came across a specific error by looking at the system log file. This log file can be found within OSX at:
/var/log/system.log

The error reported:
kernel[0]: nfs server SERVER:/path: lockd not responding

To find if your clients having this same issue,try:
cat /var/log/system.log | grep nfs

The fix is quite simple. Add the nolocks option to the mount arguments. This can be done through the Directory Utility.

For manual mounts through the terminal it should be something like:
mount_nfs -P -o nolocks,nosuid server:/path /localpath

I’m not sure what the consequences are by setting this option, but it did fix our problem perfectly and our OSX clients run like a charm.

Thanks for reading.