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Force Firefox to Remember Initial Window Setting in KDE

I have a laptop with the resolution of 1440×900…so when I installed the latest TR6 from PCLinuxOS, I was dismayed to find out that when launching Firefox, it opened up in a window that was 1024 pixels. Of course, I maximized this and then closed it thinking that Firefox would remember my settings. The problem is…it didn’t remember my settings.

When I opened Firefox up again, it popped up to say hello once again at 1024 pixels. Sure, you can right click on the Firefox window bar and drill down into application specific settings via KDE (yes, it’s that configurable) but I didn’t want to have to do this…because if I did, ALL Firefox windows would open up maximized…and that includes any pop-ups as well. I also know that you can drill down even further to fix THAT problem. However, it should ‘just work’ right? You shouldn’t have to change anything at all correct? Well, I’ve found a fix that is pretty easy to accomplish…and I hope it helps the hundreds of people I found when searching through google on this.

Open up Firefox and it will open at the smaller screen size…in my case, it opened up 1024 px in width on my 1440px screen. Then, hover over the top right hand corner with your mouse until you get the resize arrow. Resize the window click dragging it to the top, right hand corner of the screen. It should ‘snap-in’ once you get close to maximized size. Now close the window, and open Firefox again. It should open up fully maximized.

I sure hope this saves someone time…because I spent the better part of a morning trying to fix this.

Install the Latest Kernel in PCLinuxOS

Do you run PCLinuxOS 2007 or Minime 2008 and would you like to take advantage of the latest kernel for PCLinuxOS? You can do this by enabling the ‘testing’ portion of the repository.

Read about Repository Control in PCLinuxOS

You’ll be looking for the ‘sections’ blank when viewing repository details and you’ll just need to add ‘testing’ to the end of the line (don’t replace the entires there already). Once that is done, click the reload button in Synaptic and allow it to refresh your local rpm cache.

Click the ‘search’ button and search for the keyword ‘kernel’. Look for the highest number of kernel that is returned. At the time of this writing, the 2.6.26.8 kernel was the newest kernel for PCLinuxOS (it has .27 patches all over in it…so it’s quite a nice kernel). Click and install that kernel and allow it to select any packages it needs to install. Once installed, you can remove the word testing from the repository (this is recommended to prevent your system from downloading ALL testing packages/updates) and click the reload button for Synaptic.

Reboot and choose the new kernel on your grub menu. Test things to see how they work. If everything is good to go, congratulations! You’ve just installed the latest kernel in PCLinuxOS.

To make this kernel the default one, you can use the PCLinuxOS Control Center and Change the Way the System Boots. I’ll cover this in a later post. Hope this helps a few of you out there. I know it is often asked on IRC.

Host Your Own Domain and Webserver

This article is from 2006! The information here may not be the most current. You can visit an updated version here!

Doesn’t sound like anything new right? Well, some people may not know of this method.

Normally, to host your own webpage you would need to spend around 7 bucks to purchase a domain. Next you would need a hosting plan that usually runs around 3-15 dollars per month to serve up your web pages.

What most don’t realize is that you can skip these steps all together…you don’t need to get dedicated Windows or Linux Hosting (this blog is hosted on dedicated hosting…but started out in my apartment!) to serve pages up to your friends and family. You absolutely do not need to get domain name services through a provider. You can even host your own webserver using a dialup connection (that’s right…I said dialup) although. I don’t recommend it (but I’ve done it using 56.6kbps).

Why would you want to do this? My reply…to stay connected to friends and family…perhaps throw up a gallery so that your grandparents can see pics of your new dog/car/tinfoil hat. Sure, you could waste my time with MyWaste..er..space and be barraged daily by advertisers and solicitors…or you could roll your own web host, install a gallery or website, and provide media to your friends and family without costing yourself a dime. That’s right, NO COST (except time spent getting it running). Just remember, your website might not survive a digging or slashdotting if you run it yourself. Keep that in mind 🙂 So without more chatter, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of things:

Do you cringe at the thought of buying a domain and putting up with the headache of trying to make sure your IP address is up to date with your domain? Do you hate the 40 dollars you spend on DNS service each year to resolve your IP address to your hostname? Read on and learn the the flat-broke-and-busted way of maintaining a fixed hostname for your IP…even if you have dialup.

I’ll divide this up into 2 sections. The first will deal with Linux. The second, Windows. This is only something that I’ve found easy to do and the price is just right (it’s free). The only thing that I recommend is a dedicated internet connection (cable, DSL) but even this is not necessary as dialup can be used. I recommend that you use the Linux way of doing things since it is more secure and doesn’t require a restart every time you patch it.

*note: I’m assuming that you aren’t behind a firewall/proxy of any kind and that your ISP doesn’t block port 80 traffic. If your ISP blocks port 80, see the appendix at the end of this article.

LINUX

No matter what version of Linux you run, chances are that you’ll be able to install the apache webserver. This is good news as over half the websites of the world are run by the extremely efficient and speedy apache. I’m not going to address the specifics of how to set up your website…only how to get it a fixed address without buying a domain. So, you have your pages dropped into your webservers public directory…good. Now, how to resolve your IP…lets say it is…25.24.4.166 (for our example) and you want it to have a host.name.com to bind to. Easy to resolve. Go to http://www.no-ip.com/index.ph p and sign up. You can get a site from noip that is like yourname.theirdomain.com/.net/.info. They have cool names like sytes.net and servebeer.org…even workisboring.com

You’ll be able to choose your own top level name…for instance, Ithink.dnsiskinky.com could be your new domain name. Next download a client from the download tab: https://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php

The linux client is a tar.gz source and is simple to install. Follow the instructions when installing. You may have to install compilation tools (devel packages like GCC) to install the client. You now are the proud owner of yoursite.theirsite.com and your IP will ALWAYS update (as long as noip.com is up) each time you log on/sign on/beam up or whatever it is you do.

How does this help you? Well, if you’re like me, you have a dynamic IP address. If you connect to the internet via cable, dialup, or dsl…you also have a dynamic IP address. Dynamic means that it will change from time to time without warning. So by binding yoursite.theirsite.com to your IP address…you don’t ever have to worry about what IP address you have anymore. Instead, you’ll always be able to connect using yoursite.theirsite.com. You can host a webserver using Apache and a virtual host (also known as a Virtual Private server or VPS Hosting) in this style as well (look for another how-to on this subject later) so that everyone can visit a shiny website at yoursite.theirsite.com.

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Find Files & Directories Not Visible to Others for Webserver

I wanted a quick way to be able to find out what files weren’t visible to others (and therefore, not visible to website visitors). Messing with arguments and the file command, you can do the following:

find -type f ! -perm -444

This locates all files not visible to ‘others’ in the current directory. You can apply this to directories as well:

find -type d ! -perm -111

Hope this helps people like it helped me. 🙂

Read & Display Single Line of a File

Sometimes when I’m troubleshooting a PHP error and a function is called in the debugger that gives me a line number of a file to look at, I want to know what that line says without opening up the file. Using the command line, you can accomplish this in the following way:

head -n 96 filename.php | tail -n 1

This allows you to quickly display the 96th line of filename.php. Hope this helps someone like it has me.

Customizing PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime

So, HowtoForge has a perfect desktop for PCLinuxOS 2007…how about something similar for 2008 MiniMe? I won’t go into near as much detail as they do there but I’ll go over how I get my desktop up and rolling after a fresh install of PCLinuxOS Minime 2008.

Putting it Together — Build Your Own PCLOS

MiniMe is the lesser known offspring of PCLinuxOS 2007 that ships with a 2.6.22.15 kernel and is a minimalistic installation of the KDE desktop 3.5.9. Texstar provides this distribution for those wanting to remaster their installations…it’s a base for other remastered projects like PCLinuxOS Gnome. Remastering and the Make LiveCD wizard enable users to customize their distribution and make a bootable backup CD with all their customizations OR release their own customized distribution. You can also use the Make LiveUSB wizard to create your very own thumbdrive PCLinuxOS.

I found it strange that no one had written anything about MimiMe-to on getting PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniMe up and running as a desktop replacement so I decided to give it a go. The aim of this article isn’t to copy Howtoforge’s great series on perfect installations…but to show how I get PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime up to a perfect installation for me. This means all web video, audio, fonts, and tools I need are installed. So let’s get at it.

What Do We Need?

First and foremost, do a complete upgrade of your fresh installed system. Open Synaptic >> Reload >> Mark all Upgrades >> Apply. It’s going to take a while to get all the updates you’ll need. Do NOT enable the testing repository until after you install your graphics driver at the end of this article…just perform a straight update from main.

Now let’s start installing stuff that is needed on a daily basis. I’m more of a lightweight type of guy so I don’t need robust office applications so my tastes may not line up with yours. Please substitute applications where you see fit…the repositories most likely have them.

To give a brief, high level overview of my daily use applications:

firefox3
Opera
K3B
konversation
pidgin
skype_static
koffice
gimp
Amarok
claws-mail
kdeaddons-kate
kdeaddons-ark
kdegraphics-ksnapshot (for taking screenshots)

Those are the high level applications I use on a daily basis to get things done. Whenever you are prompted to mark other packages for install, go ahead and and choose “mark”. Click apply and let the your daily use applications install.

Continue reading “Customizing PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime”