Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

I was looking for a way to convert Microsoft .doc files to plain text (txt) in Linux directly through terminal.
After some lookup in Google Groups I found ANTIWORD! .
Luckily Debian comes even with a package containing the nice nifty program.
Here is the description of antiword - Converts MS Word files to text, PS and PDF
Fun, desciprtion Eh? Ain't it?
There are some other ways to Convert doc files to plain text, for instance you could use the command catdoc , for example to convert simple .doc to .txt file use catdoc -a whitepaper.doc.
Another way to convert .doc files to .txt mostly used by developers is via the wvware (nothing to do with vmware!:)) utility.
wvware could directly convert it to html. For example:
wvWare file.doc >file.htmlor
wvText file.doc file.txt
. A lot of things I'll skip here are well explained in the article Viewing Word files at the command line .

Some time ago I needed to have get some insight in Windows Vista commands. To achieve my tasks back then I used some the following Windows Vista Commands list . It would be probably interesting for you to check out commandswindows's website .

Yesterday I found an interesting small proggie that enables you to tray in a fast manner any unix application
to the GNOME, KDE's system tray.
Alltray also works with many other desktop environments and window managers.
This application made my life a bit easier since now I'm able to send into the tray my mail application of choice (Thunderbird), or as called in Debian icedove. To do that all I had to do was:

$ alltray icedove . To make this behaviour permanent you can use:
The program alacarte which allows you to edit your Gnome menus in a fast and comfortable manner.
For instance on Debian run alacarte Go to Internet -> Icedove Mail/News click Properties and change the default command: icedove %u change with alltray icedove %u
Congrats your Thunderbird will now go to tray any time you run it.
Now you can do the same with any other application that lacks tray support.
Here is a link to Alltray's website

I think I mentioned on my blog that until I've upgraded to Debian Unstable, my subtitles in Bulgarian stopped working.
That happens in all of the Video supporting programs. I do a lot of reading and writting in English thus I have exported default LANG variable to en_US.UTF8
(my LANG is LANG=en_UTF-8). I tried everything via configuration files in Both Mplayer and Vlc to make the players work with Cyrillic in CP1251, badly enough nothing helped.
After some time of trying out stuff I came to the following solution. I've created files:
/usr/local/bin/vlc and /usr/local/bin/gmplayer
containing:

1. vlc's file
#!/bin/sh
LANG=bg_BG.CP1251 exec /usr/bin/vlc "$@"

2. gmplayer's file
#!/bin/sh
LANG=bg_BG.CP1251 exec /usr/bin/gmplayer "$@"

The "$@" is a default bash variable which contains everything passed by next to /usr/bin/vlc and /usr/bin/gmplayer

MAC stands for (Media Access Control) and stands for the computer physical address in LAN networks.
Ethernet MAC is a six byte number, usually expressed as a twelve digit hexadecimal number.
IPs are translated to Mac via a protocol called ARP (Address Resolution Protocol).
Let's say Computer with IP 10.10.10.1 wants to send information to another system on the LAN with an IP of 10.10.10.2.
10.10.10.1 will first send broadcast to all stations on the LAN asking who has the address of 10.10.10.2.
Then the box possessing 10.10.10.2 will respond to 10.10.10.2 with it's MAC address which would be temporary stored
in 10.10.10.2's ARP's table in order to make 10.10.10.1 recognize 10.10.10.2 later on.

Host 1 (10.10.10.1): Hello everyone on the LAN (FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF), who has the IP 10.10.10.2? My MAC is DE:AB:BE:EF:FF:FE so you can respond back to me. Host 2 (10.10.10.2): Hello DE:AB:BE:EF:FF:FE, I have IP 10.10.10.2 and my MAC address is 1C:43:B6:F8:9B:1E so you can send your IP packets to me.
There are a plenty of reasons that might force to wish for changing your mac. Though I'll mention only one
1. To get across MAC filtering set on a router. Or in other words to bee able to access your internet with all your computers at home (don't try them simultaneously!). For example recently a cousin of mine bought a second notebook for her daughter.
They desired to be able to access the internet with both the PCs. I contacted the ISP with a request to add me a second MAC address, just to find that this wasn't possible with this exact ISP.
Their computer ran dual boot install of a GNU/Linux system as well as Windows Vista, thus I needed to change their existing MAC address in both Windows and Linux
Here is how I achieved that:
1. In Linux

Really simple:
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 (substitute here with your desired MAC)
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

2. On BSD

/sbin/ifconfig xl0 link 00:00:00:AA:AA:AB (subst with MAC here), xl0 is your interface name
/sbin/ifconfig xl0 up

3. In Windows XP
There are a couple of ways to go in Windows. The hardest way is to use regedit and to look and substitute some obscure values.
Another a bit easier way is to use either MacMakeUp , Smac or EtherChange
The classic way to change Mac in Windows XP is:

Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel and double click on Network and Dial-up Connections
a) Right click on the NIC you want to change the MAC address and click on properties.
b) Under "General" tab, click on the "Configure" button
c) Click on "Advanced" tab
d) Under "Property section", you should see an item called "Network Address" or "Locally Administered Address", click on it.
e) On the right side, under "Value", type in the New MAC address you want to assign to your NIC. Usually this value is entered without the "-" between the MAC address numbers.
f) Goto command prompt and type in "ipconfig /all" or "net config rdr" to verify the changes are applied.

4. In Windows Vista

Go to Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Properties (on Connection using ...) Configure -> Advanced -> Network Address (Then type your MAC Here)

All the credits for this post go to the article Changing Your MAC Address In Window XP/Vista, Linux And Mac OS X which explains what you read above even more thoroughly.
Most of the information here is originally found in the above article.

Today I had the task to Install Ubuntu GNU / Linux on Toshiba L300 PLSBGE Laptop.

I had already installed Windows Vista Enterprise on the notebook. Thus I used Acronis Disk Directory Suite to partition the harddrive for Ubuntu even though I could have used the gparted included on Ubuntu's installation CD. I've asked specificly if
I could use the Ubuntu CD to repartition my hard drive in #ubuntu in irc.freenode.net.
The answer was positive it's absolutely safe to resize an NTFS partition using Ubuntu's installation LiveCD and gparted. That seems like a good news for all of us the free software users / enthusiasts / hobbyists etc.
I hated the default Ubuntu behaviour it automatically decided to install itself on a automatically created 2.5 GB partition.
I thought it won't be so dumb to install itself on such a tiny partition. Well guess what I was wrong IT WAS SO DUMB!
Even though I had already 80 GB ext3 partition. Ubuntu's default behaviour was to install on an automatically created 2.5GB partition.
Right after the installation I was stunned just to realize there was no free space on the drive where the dumbass installed itself.
After that I had some issues deleting the already cretead partitions, which for some reason messed up. Luckily the good old fdisk fixed the situation so I could easily delete all the partitions except the vista and recreate them again using gparted with Ubuntu's install LiveCD. The install was completely flawless. Everything worked out of the box, no external efforts to fix broken stuff like usually happens in Linux fantastic! The only broken thing was that switching to plain console with ctrl+alt+f1 would visualize a non working display output and I couldn't see the ttys at all. That wasn't such a hassle since the system is planned to work only in GUI mode. I guess Ubuntu is going through a real development with a positive end results. Even external USB printer Canon PIXMA IP3300 worked by simply plugging it in. For some weird reason to make the printer work correctly I had to use driver for Canon PIXMA IP3000. Anyways it worked with it and the printer started printing correctly even though officially on some of the linux printers databases it's reported the printer won't work correctly never ever.

Every time after installing a plain new Debian or Ubuntu system, I feel ridiculous cause of the fact. That many of the programs I do use in my daily work with my pc ain't there ready to use. In that manner of thoughts it's really really irritating for me to try to memorize the whole list of programs I usually use not to mention that I hardly could remember the exact name of the packages containing the programs. Moreover it's really irritating to type a hundred times
apt-cache search programname;
apt-get install programtoinstall;
. To make my daily life and hopefully my blog readers life easier I've decided to make a list of all the packages to install:
here is the one liner command required to install the whole heap of packages

$ apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly libxine1-ffmpeg vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc \
mplayer wifi-radar extremetuxracer powermanga supertux chromium kbedic transmission openoffice.org deluge \
alltray xine-ui dodgindiamond2 zblast-x11 blobwars briquolo kamefu blender inkscape gftp xchat \
k3b gnochm tecnoballz audacious audacity rezound opencubicplayer virtualbox gnomad2 kino grip xawtv \
cheese mozilla-helix-player abiword bgoffice-computer-terms sun-java-fonts sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin \
sun-java6-source sun-java6-jre sun-java6-demo dia gajim mc dpkg-dev amsn elinks lynx iptraf sniffit \
ettercap wireshark bluefish thunderbird screenlets verse bible-kjv dict-easton gnomesword sword-text-kjv realplayer pidgin \
ncurses-dev cbedic awn-manager centerim-utf8 apachetop alsa-oss oss-compat iftop

For your convenience I've also prepared a small shell script I've called desktop-bundle.sh download desktop-bundle.sh here
Just in case if you're wondering what exactly is the above package bundle installation good for.
Here is a few explanatory notes next to it:

mozilla-plugin-vlc - Allows mozilla to play in embeded player various video files

gftp - Gnome's FTP client

xchat - IRC Gnome Chat program

cheese - A program to make pictures and suchalike

k3b - kde's cd burner

kino - video editor

sun-java6-jdk, sun-java6-jre, sun-java6-plugin - allows you to run properly java applications on your Linux system both from the command line and in browser

screenlets - explained in my previous post here

wifi-radar - a gnome wifi detection and connection tool

cbedic - a bulgarian / english console dictionary I heavily use

dia - Diagram drawing software (handy to draw your for instance network diagrams)

kbedic - kde Bulgarian / English dictionary. To make it work properly you'll need also the bedic data files, which could be downloaded here

verse, bible-kjv, gnomesword - This and the rest bible related packages are a nice packages I use to daily read and research the bible, since I'm an Orthodox Christian

vlc - Nowdays I'm changing in using vlc to watch videos since mplayer is getting more and more old fashioned and it's behaviour is a bit disappointing sometimes

gnomechm - An app to read Microsoft's CHM help file

grip - Program to RIP audio files

opencubicplayer - the good old Cubic Player we all enjoyed in MS-DOS and Novell DOS to play various XM, S3M, MOD, IT etc. files, it's really nice that this version supports MP3 file format

audacity - An application to record sounds, supports songs sound reverse, for example you can use it to listen your mp3 files backwards, let's say to check if a song contains a satanic message or not :)

dosbox - dos emulator to run old school dos games I love this one

inkscape - 2D vector design software

blender - 3D design software

gajim - might need that one in case if you intend to use Jabber

pidgin - the program I use as an ICQ, MSN client

transmission, deluge - nice bittorrent softwares

kompozer, bluefish - editors similar more or less to the famous dreamweaver. kompozer is more advanced and is much closer to dreamweaver

virtualbox - The Sun's Virtual Machine substitute for VMWare, works okay maybe 20 or 30% slower than VMWare

rezound - again a nice sound editor, like audacity

xine - video player, most people who remember the times before few years should know it

amsn - MSN chat client

avant-window-navigator - A MacOS X like panel for the GNOME Desktop. Features a taskbar behaving similar to Mac OSX's dock.
There is one drawback it doesn't support the dock to be positioned anywhere except on the bottom of the screen
chromium, supertux, powermanga etc. - this and many of the rest are nice games I love to play every now and then when I get completely pissed off

Well that's all for now. Hope this post would be interesting to somebody out there.

After my upgrade to Debian Unstable I experienced problems with opening the microsoft office 2007 .docx files.
The error message that poped up every time I tried opening a docx file was:
Read-Error. Data could not be read from the file
I wasted some time looking for people who experienced the same issue and possible solution to the situation.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any fix online until I found the fix on my own experimenting installing different versions of the odf-converter-integrator.
First I've tried updating my current installed odf-converter-integrator version, which was odf-converter-integrator 0.2.1.
I've upgraded to a version odf-converter-integrator_0.2.2_i386.deb.
Unluckily that the problem persisted, so I tried some other suggested possible work arounds, none of which worked.
I was sure there should be a way to make it work so I continued trying stuff until I FOUND THE SOLUTION.
The solution was as simple as downloading odf-converter-integrator_strawberry_0.2.3-2_i386.deb from the odf-converter-integrator download page
And next install it executing:
dpkg -i --force-all odf-converter-integrator_strawberry_0.2.3-2_i386.deb
Hooray opening docx works corretly on my Debian Unstable now! I bet it works for you as well Praise the Lord!

Recently I had to make Ubuntu system to properly deal with Microsoft Office 2007 XML based .docx file format.
I achieved that in the following way:
1. Use the following odf-converter-integrator download link to download odf-converter-integrator-chocolate. The release offered in my case was odf-converter-integrator-chocolate_0.1.4-1b_amd64.deb.
2. Next install it with:
dpkg -i odf-converter-integrator-chocolate_0.1.4-1b_amd64.deb
Sounds simple eh? Indeed it is. Now you're ready to open docx files with your 64 bit Ubuntu Jaunty GNU/Linux natively in OpenOffice.

It's incredibly simple and comes to the command:
$ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree Enjoy your brand new working Adobe Flash player.

To replicate your packages selection on another machine (or restore it if re-installing),
You can type:
$ aptitude --display-format '%p' search '?installed!?automatic' >~/my-packages Move the file "my-packages" to the other machine, and there type: $ sudo xargs aptitude --schedule-only install < my-packages ; sudo aptitude install It might be interesting for you to always check the automate command

I was looking for a way to burn CDs under Windows Vista. After some looking in Google I found cdburnerxp probably the apps is quite decent, unfortunately I couldn't use it to properly burn an iso of ubuntu. Thus I looked for a software which does ISO burning in Windows and I came across isorecorder which hopefully would work correctly.

I recently installed Windows Vista Enterprise on my cousin's notebook model (Toshiba L300 PLSBGE). I've used the 64 bit Vista release and I've installed most of the hardware without any setbacks. However Toshiba's website lacked the 64 bit Vista video drivers. Considering the fact in order to manage the problem I had to use intel's drivers website and download and install the correct driver for my graphic adapter from there. To adequately catch the correct video card the notebook has I had to use the Windows diagnostics and benchmarking program Everest .

Here are two books on Human Resource Management Human Resource Management (MGT - 501)
Strategic Human Resource Management View
Strategic Human Resources Management - Aligning with the Mission

For my studies in HAN I had to do a couple of projects. I thought that the project could
be of any added value to somebody out there. Therefore I'm publishing the projects here.
International Labour Law Project on Collective Labout Agreements (Great Britain and The Netherlands)
Here is my projects on Changemanagement Management - Plan to make a change in a company involved into Virtual Entertainment Industry as well as the other
My Changemanagement Individual plan discussing integration of OrangeHRM
For all not familiar with OrangeHRM it's a nice open source system to manage your Human Resources within your company.
Here is the project we had to build with my colleagues for International Marketing (IMM).
1. Internal Analysis of Aeroflot Company
2. Aeroflot Internal and External Analysis & Crafting Strategies to improve Aeroflot position on the Market
. Another project we developed previous semester in ABS (Arnhem Business School) HAN is:
The IBP (International Business Plan).
Here is a line to it as well: 1. An almost complete version of the International Business Plan for PinPane (A touchscreen notebooks producer) . Just in case if you wonder what is the project for. The project is for a company producing Touchscreen displays who already operates
in two countries and aims to spread to a third one. In the Business Plan it's described what could the company do to achieve the expansion
and moreover what will be the expansion expenses.
The second semester we also had that SHR subject (Strategic HR) which was mostly centered around a crafted concept the teachers called
Gyroscopic Self Management. There was even a book discussing the gyroscopic self management approach, even though in reality the book doesn't said nothing consistant, it's a crap
, which pretty much looked like the method itself. You wonder what gyroscopic self management is?
It's a destructive method of brainwashing creating all negative you could imagine, being of course presented as something superberb,
something that really could make a difference in your life. A sort of sect philosophy centered around a few guys own unrealized insanity.
You can read the Gyroscopic Self Management book here Here is also a link to a Group in Google that we used for our SHR (Strategic HR) project which failed HRQM G Cluster Google Group
.

Today one of the fellow-tenants of Nomen, a friend of mine in whom I'm staying right now
Was disbelieving that a lot of the rock and Metal is heavily involved with Satanism and
suchalike. Thus I had to show her a bunch of videos in youtube which showed clearly
how many of the rock musicians incorporate a lot of satanic messages if the message is reverse
played back. One of the most famous songs in which this tendency is clearly showed is
Led Zeppelin's Stairway to heaven.
Here is video in youtube showing the reverse speech version of the song Led Zeppelin's Stairway to heaven reverse speeched
. There is some interesting things on the following website even though many of the things mentioned there are a bit exaggerated.
If you'd like more on the topic make sure you check out in youtube some key phrases like "satanism in rock", "satan in music, reverse speech" etc.

I tried using festival today just to realize it doesn't work anymore.
For instance "echo test" |festival --tts would fail with the annoying
"Linux: can't open /dev/dsp" error message. I found the solution in ubuntuforums,
the solution is originally taken from "the Gentoo Speechd Howto".
The solution is to create .festivalrc in your home as well as to the homes of all users intending to use festival.
Here is how:

printf ";use ALSA\n(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)\n(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command \"aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r \$SR \$FILE\")\n" > .festivalrc

I'm staying in a friend's place for few days. Nasko a friend of mine has apple pc and showed me some nice features of the apple MacBook's Mac OS X. One of the features I liked was the Apple Widgets which are helpful in facilitating the work with your pc. The same widgets are also included in Windows Vista (I always disabled that when used Vista).
Anyways I wondered if there is a way to have the same shiny widgets running on my Debian GNU/Linux.
I first found Gdesklets which basicly is a collection of Widgets for the Linux Gnome desktop written in Python. To run the gdesklet after installation
I had to issue the command:
$ gdesklets . Then in the tray a small tray puzzle icon appears. I sort of wondered a bit until I figured out how to add some gdesklet widgets.
To do that I had to select
"Manage Desklets" and through the gdesklets shell
to click twice the widget I would like to add to the desktop and then drag it to the exact desktop place I would like it to have it positioned.
I have to emphasize gdesklets widgets are very, very buggy. Many of the widgets I tried crashed the whole application.
After which I had to manually kill the gdesklets app
and delete all it's temporary files located in
~/.gdesklets directory. Many of the apps that didn't crashed the gdesklets that required extra data from lmsensors never worked even though I have working version of lmsensors.
I suspect some of the widgets which failed to gather data from lmsensors cause
My notebook is Lenovo Thinkpad R61 and uses some custom features from the thinkpad_acpi kernel module
. Another possible reason for the crashes and misworkings of some components of gdesklets could be because I'm currently running Debian Unstable.

After being a bit disappointment from gdesklets experience.
I went looking further for some Linux widgets alternative.
Next widget related gnome prog I stucked on was jackfield . This one is said to have worked with Apple's Widgets I don't believe it does any more since it's not actively developed anymore.
I tried the jackfield python program with no luck. The untarred archive of it was really messy and what was even worse was it lacked any documentation.
Hence I continued my quest for widgets just to came across a real working Gnome widget application.
Just to find Screenlets! .
I've red somewhere that Screenlets is based on jacfield.
The current release of Gnome Screenlets which by the way is officially part of gnome-look.org is 0.1.2. I was pleased to find the application worked pretty decent.
Screenlets includes many, many widgets:
Here is a link containg a list of all the screenlets widgets
. If you like to have a general idea of how screenlets looks like please check out the screenlet in action screenshots

I needed to have a quick way to check my battery status via terminal and I googled around looking
for a solution. I found the following website explaining in a pretty good way "How to check your battery status in Console".
. Just like the blog explains the proper way to do that in Linux is via the acpi command. In case if you don't have, yet the command please install it.

1. The fastest way to check the laptop battery status is via: 

$ acpi
The output would be something like this:
Battery 1: discharging, 91%, 02:00:09 remaining


2. Check laptop battery temperature:

$ acpi -t

3. Check laptop battery AC Power Status

$ acpi -a

4. Check everything related to acpi

$ acpi -V

Another possible way to check for your notebook battery status from console in Linux is via:
acpitool

1. Command to show general information for battery status:

$ acpitool

2. For detailed battery information use:

$ acpitool -B add "-v" for verbose output

3. Show information about AC power.

$ acpitool -a

Some of the other possible ways to check your battery charge status via console are either via: yabs ( Yet Another Battery Status ) script or via:

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state or
cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info

Here is an interesting website containing dozens of valueable cli based applications.
Check it out on Cli-Apps.org

A friend of mine Amridikon has suggested me a nice website containing plenty of valueable tech gadgets.
Some of them include things like Wifi/WLAN/Wireless Network Signal Detector (keychain) - That's a nice keyholder which detects the open Wireless/WLAN networks and saves you time and efforts in bringing out your notebook everytime you'd like to check if open wireless network is available for connection. There are a couple of models you can choose from.
Some of the other handy gadgets are:
Dual SIM Cards .
My personal favourite is 5-Band GSM/CDMA/3G Handheld Phone Signal Blocker (20M range)
. One more nice thing about this cool website is that all shipment of gadgets bought for sums higher than 50$ (bucks) is free!

Here is a link to a friend's of mine personal blog. Unfortunately the blog is fully in Bulgarian and therefore requires you to be a native Bulgarian speaker. However the blog content is a valuable one and even a translate via Google Translate might be of use to English speakers. Here is a link to the Blog itself
Martin Petrov's Personal Blog

Recently I was looking for a handy way to generate nice html or php like gallery. After some asking in freenode and some help provided by some guys from #debian chan as well as some personal research. I came across 4 handy progs that works like a charm. Here is a list of the generators:
1. llgal (llgal is an easy and fast on-line gallery generator based on iGal)
2. igal1 and igal2 (igal is a quick and easy program for placing your images online.)
3. bbgallery (small perl script generating the galleries)
. All of this gives you a way to modify the default templates according to your willings.
Be aware that bbgallery requires perl html compatability.
A small example of what you can expect from the newly generated gallery can be seen here generated with llgal and some more here generated with igal .
I personally liked more the generated default galleries with igal because they looked a bit more fancy although that llgal includes a way more advanced possibilities and options.
One of the main things that could lead you into using llgal instead of igal is that llgal supports generation of galleries from directories and subdirectories in a recursive manner, where the end generated output lists you all your pictures from directories and it's sublinks into a common gallery right into the root directory it was executed.
One more helpful tip in case if you decide to include all subdirectories in a unique gallery use:
llgal --Pall .
llgal comes with a handy howto that describes many of the fancy llgal features.
Hope you have some fun with this three.

I wanted to install Jalbum on Debian GNU/Linux and as usual with GNU/Linux there were some complications. This time the Java installer won't run reporting error:
No Java virtual machine could be found from your PATH debian .
I really wanted it badly to work on Debian and after some time I happily managed to make it work.
Here is how:

1. Execute:
# apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-source sun-java6-demo

2. Execute:
# update-alternatives --config java

There are 5 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).

  Selection    Path                                       Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java          1043      auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/gij-4.3                            43        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/jamvm                              10        manual mode
  3            /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/jre/bin/java   63        manual mode
  4            /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java        63        manual mode
  5            /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java          1043      manual mode

Select 4 as default.

Now go and Execute

sh Jalbuminstall.bin

Since quite some time I'm experiencing this annoying behaviour on side of Thunderbird. Every time I receive a new mail which includes embedded html code with pictures, Thunderbird blocks them until I explicitly select the picture and allow it to display or either allow picture displaying for the whole domain for the future references. Today I decided at last to put an end to this boredom and look for a solution.
Here is the way I changed this terrible behaviour:

1. Go to Thunderbird "Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor"
2. Look for the variables record mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image
use the mouse to select "toggle" value to switch the default value from
"true" to "false".

That should be it.

Since I upgraded to the latest Debian unstable I was forced to switch from the good old ipw3945 wireless driver to the newer one with which I had a bunch of unpleasent experienced, that was a good reason for me to kept myself back to the ipw3945. Anyways all my attempts to port the already 2 years old ipw3945 without a development to my 2.6.30-1-amd64 left void. Therefore I had to unwillingly switch to the iwl3945 driver. To do so I had to:
1. edit /etc/modprobe.d/00local.conf and remove the line

install iwl3945 /bin/true

2. edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment the line

blacklist iwl3945

3. edit /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945.conf and comment out

install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945 ; \
sleep 2 ; /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet
remove  ipw3945 /etc/init.d/ipw3945d modprobe-stop && modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945

4. edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and comment out

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="ipw3945", ATTR{address}=="00:1c:bf:bd:24:59", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="wlan0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:1c:bf:bd:24:59", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="wlan*", NAME="wlan0"

5. Last but not least:
rmmod iwl3945; modprobe iwl3945;

That so far was required to switch from ipw3945 to iwl3945.

Unfortunately after the switch I was pretty unhappy of the behaviour of the iwl3945 driver.
Like for example the driver won't detect many of the wireless networks during scan compared to the one detected by the old ipw3945 driver.
I googled and found in Google many contradictions considering which driver (ipw3945 or iwl3945) prooves to be better. Some praised ipw3945 and tended to hold unto it while others were proclaiming that iwl3945 works in a much better manner.
Again some Googling and thinking over the created problem led me to a website which suggsted a helpful tip on how to intialize
the iwl3945 driver. That tip IMPROVED A LOT! the scanning behaviour of the iwl3945 driver.
Here is the tip itself:

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/iwl3945.conf and add to it the following: 

alias wlan0 iwl3945
# the line below disables iwl3945 wireless driver hardware scanning
options iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1
# extend the network channels detected to 13
options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU

After all is done the only left thing is to:
reload the iwl3945 driver

rmmod iwl3945
modprobe iwl3945

And Hooray! It works Again! You will notice now much more networks are being detected
and apart from that scanning returns results every time you scan for wireless networks
To conclude the post I'll say a few words on the line:
options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU
as well as explain briefly about wicd Many of you would wonder what is that about, well it's about that on how many channels
would wireless networks be detected. For example in the European Union wireless networks
could be configured to work on channels up to 13, just to compare in the USA less channels
are available thus the default behaviour of the iwl3945 driver is not to detect wireless
networks on channels above 10 (I believe?). The above example communicates to the cfg80211 kernel
module that more wireless channels are available since we're in the EU (European Union).
For kernels below version 2.6.24 you might need to use the variable:

 options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU 

instead of the one I add above.

. Well let me conclude the post with some handy wireless manager I use some time ago.
Longly I (suffered) with Gnome's default gnome-network-manager, nevertheless it's proven that pain doesn't waste forever.
Mine would not too:

I Googled just to know if there are Good alternatives to gnome-network-manager and I found the nifty Wicd manager. Which behaviour I like much more than the classic wifi-radar or gnome-network-manager.
This days I heavily use the nice Wicd peace of soft.
So in case if you still don't have it installed on your GNU/Linux go for it!
If you want to give some credits for this I hope helpful post please give them to God

While playing with my installed programs on my recently updated Debian I stepped into a problem with
/usr/lib32/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so.
It seems the library was linked to two non-existing libraries:
/emul/ia32-linux/lib/libwrap.so.0 as well as /emul/ia32-linux/usr/lib/libgdbm.so.3.
A temporary solution to the issue is pointed out in Debian of the Debian Bug reports . As the report reads to solve that it's required to:

1. Download libwrap0_7.6.q-18_i386.deb and libgdbm3_1.8.3-6+b1_i386.deb.
2. Extract the packages:
dpkg -X libwrap0_7.6.q-18_i386.deb /emul/ia32-linux/
dpkg -X libgdbm3_1.8.3-6+b1_i386.deb /emul/ia32-linux/
3. echo /emul/ia32-linux/lib >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ia32.conf
4. Execute /sbin/ldconfig
5. Check if all is properly linked
Execute ldd /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so|grep -i "not found"

Hopefully all should be fixed now.

After I've recently upgraded to the latest current Debian Unstable release I stumbled upon many problems, many of which are discussed and fixes provided on the prevoius posts. One of the many terrible things I had to fix MANUALLY (I'm starting to hate that word), are the issues with sound and microphone in Skype. I'm using Skype 2.0.0.72, because skype_static-2.1.0.47 gives me worries, crashing every now and then. To fix my problems with sound and microphone while Googling I found this nice Aryn's Blog post .
Here is what worked for me to fix the issues.

Execute
1.  apt-get install libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa 
libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio
2.  apt-get install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio
3.  apt-get install paprefs pavucontrol padevchooser

Next 

4.  open gnome-alsamixer and make sure your "Mic" is not muted 
(in some cases it might be some capture field muted ain't sure?)
5.  Start pavucontrol and make sure in the Input Devices 
the mute button is not selected
6.  Go to the gnome panel System -> Preferences -> Sound and 
make sure in the Input menu Microphone is not muted
7.  start aumix and Make sure your Microphone is 
"Mic" and "Igain" is not set to low volume
8.  Execute: alsactl store to make sure that alsa settings 
are not lost on system restart
9.  In your home directory edit ~/.asoundrc

And add
--- SNIP ---
pcm.card0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}
ctl.card0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}
   -----

10. Edit  /etc/libao.conf and make sure it contains default_driver=pulse
11. Edit ~/.profile and add: 
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse to it
12. Open Skype go to "Sound Devices" and 
set sound in, sound out and ringing options to:
HDA Intel (hw:intel,0)

If you're lucky with God's help and grace your skype's sound output and input via mic should be working just fine

As you have noticed in my previous posts I'm playing a bit with Toshiba Satellite L40 14B updates this days. I've came across an ugly problem with ACPI on Ubuntu Jaunty. It's really a big issue because acpi stalls and keeps loading the system on 100% leaving it with 0% idle all the time. The solution I've found is suggested on the following Ubuntu bug launchpad . As it describes the solution comes to this:

1. rm -f /etc/acpi/events/asus-wireless-on
2. rm -f /etc/acpi/events/asus-wireless-2
the next two steps are added by me
to prevent some problems caused by acpid
upgrades.
3. touch /etc/acpi/events/asus-wireless-2
4. touch /etc/acpi/events/asus-wireless-on

The current latest stable version of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. Does have the same annoying issue as in the latest Debian Unstable. What I mean is Ctrl + Alt + BackSpace doesn't work anymore. So people who has since the early days of linux get used to that just like man gets used to food, get seriously annoyed by that. The fix to the problem is explained on UbuntuGeek's website . There are a couple of approaches man could partake. The most common especially is ubuntu is to install the small proggie:

 dontzap 

and use

 sudo dontzap --disable 

. Another possible solution is to directly edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and enable the feature directly to the Xorg server.
If you want that edit the xorg.conf file and add:

Section ServerFlags
Option DontZap "false"
EndSection

Have phun