OSX has what I would call an undocumented feature of the operating system- the portable home directory. Basically, it keeps a user's home directory sync'd up between a network share and the local pc. If you are not on the network you work on the local home directory. Whenever you login on the network, the mirror agent running on the local pc synchronizes the two directories. This simple, extremely useful concept came with a steep learning curve. I think it took me two weeks to get this all working...

I wanted to use iChat as my universal chat client on my mac. iChat has native connectivity available for Bonjour, AIM and Jabber but not MSN, Yahoo! or ICQ. How could I use it then to communicate with those services? Easy.. hook up to a jabber server that has the appropriate legacy gateways enabled.. yeah real easy..

My desktop computer at home is a power hungry beast. It uses a 400W power supply, and has four fans that are constantly spinning. It was always on and made a bunch of noise. I decided to purchase an inexpensive replacement that would run silent and used minimal power.

In windows renaming a group of files is super easy.. in *nix os's it was less obvious. I finally figured out a decent one-liner..

For a while now, removable drives were not automounting on my Debian box. I could have sworn it worked at one point but couldn't really figure it out. So I manually mounted the drives after I plugged them in. This grew tiring fairly quickly...

I wanted to run a GUI application (AIX) on a local cygwin XServer (Windows) but always got a XWin: client # rejected from IP address error message appearing in the log file (%cygwin_root%\tmp\XWin.log). I looked over the FAQ and user guides on cygwin's site but to no avail. Even googling wasn't really much help. Thankfully I stumbled upon the answer in a tangential link of interest about CoLinux.

Here is the current list of questions that I have been asked after delivering and setting up the laptop. The laptop was installed January 29, 2006.

I can't control the mouse, it seems to have a mind of its own.

Phone call log with UG on February 1, 2006:
Me: Please tell me what you see on your screen.
UG: I see applications in the upper left, some blue boxes in the lower right, the time in the upper right. I hear music.. can you get the radio on this?

Motivation

This one was interesting to think about but easy to implement. I pretty much had two real options here: wireless and wired. If I were going for the true user experience, I would pick wireless. If I were going for the most inexpensive setup, I would pick wired.

Setup

I went with the wired solution because of the low cost and ease of setup (plug in cord). I already had a spare Linksys BEFR41 router/fw which wasn't being used. The router has served me well in the past, so there was no reason not to use it. While wireless solutions in Linux are certainly available, it would take money and more time to get them to work. I did some preliminary research (cause I like a challenge) and then realized that she might not even like using a pc at all, so I scrapped the idea. If I hear the I would sure love to use the computer on the couch kind of statements, I will reconsider the decision.

Motivation

The system is being created for a novice. Things should just work. I suppose, she could use a different browser than Epiphany, but it interacts well with GNOME and seems like a natural fit. If I couldn't get the major multimedia plugins to work, I would have switched to firefox. I think Epiphany moves to a firefox base in a later release, but in this one it is wrapping Mozilla.

Setup

Essentially use mozplugger to enable hookups to Totem... will fill this in later

Reference

[Embed totem into Epiphany|http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=17727&highlight=totem+b

Motivation

Any person surfing the web is bound to run into a wide variety of video formats (on news sites, music, etc). Most of these are tailored to users running Windows Media Player on top of Microsoft operating systems. Since this machine is running Totem on top of Linux, these videos won't play without some tweaking.

Setup

Grab the essential codecs and unzip them to /usr/local/lib/codecs. The mplayer site is a great reference for all sorts of video issues and playback, but all I wanted to do was get support in Totem which the unzipping accomplishes.