Oh my word - Firefox you beaut!

I noticed this little red icon in the bottom right corner of my browser. Turns out it means the page you are viewing has an RSS feed. If you click on it, it creates a folder in your bookmarks with the RSS feed as the items in the folder.

Whoa!!!

How to recover from an Evolution crash

If you have been confronted by a recurring crash of the Evolution groupware client under linux (such as Application "Evolution-2.2" has quit unexpectedly, it may be because you enabled the Generates a D-BUS message when new mail arrives. This seemed to make my Evolution client unrecoverable. I found that a reinstall of the Evolution package kept my mail account conffigurations but defaulted mail notification back to none.

How to mount a USB microdrive under Linux

Of sourse nothing is easy - we've established that.

I found good instruction from Using Digital Still Photography Devices with GNU/Linux.

Key takeaway was the following set of instructions:

Mount the camera on a specified mount point (such as /mnt/film)

mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb
modprobe usb-storage
mkdir -p /mnt/film
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/film

Unfortunately, while it apparrently successfully mounted the Hitachi Microdrive, going to the /mnt/film directory showed an empty listing. Similarly, the /proc/bus/usb directory should have a device file and doesn't.

So work to do...

How to set up a domain with a dynamic IP address

Well this proved really easy.

For those wondering what my quest was, I have a iBurst wireless internet account and wanted to host a web server, etc at home. The problem is that iBurst IP addresses change every so often. In order to provide people with a URL rather than a forever changing IP address, a DNS entry that supports regular updating and short time-to-lives (TTLs) is required. Basically, this has your domain name and anybody who types in your URL is given the IP address with the short TTL. This is important because it causes the entry to expire in the user's cache very quickly - preventing users from trying to access your machine at an IP address that has changed.

After considering the free domain and dynamic DNS services (most will give you a third level domain for free - e.g. yourname.dynip.com and give you a program that regularly updates their DNS), I decided to shell out some dosh for a second level domain name and chose GoDaddy to register a ".biz" domain. This proved really cheap ($7 per year). Then I required a free DNS service that would host my domain entries and allow dynamic updating. dnsExit seems excellent and is performing the job ably. All that was required was installing a Perl script on my Linux box and setting it to run on startup.

Fantastic!

How to get wireless networking with the DLink DWL-G520+ under Debian Linux

So I said I had my wireless networking working. I did. I said that I would post how when I did. I didn't.

Since I have installed my new 2.6.12 kernel, I now have to reinstall my DLink card. So I'll capture the knowledge this time.

First thing you'll notice is that I saud DLink card.

The SMC cards apparently have a few variants. It is some time since I tried installing the card, but from memory, the Taiwanese SMC2802W works with the Prism54 driver, but not the Chinese manufactured version on the same card.

So I got the DLink DWL-G520+ card. This card has a Texas Instruments chipset and support is far less developed than Prism based cards. I discovered this after purchasing the card. :( The guys maintaining the ACX100/ACX111 card's driverloads and says "Should have bought a Prism based card!"

The biggest issue here, is that Prism support has now been built into the 2.6 kernels. No such luck with the ACX100 driver. This means you have to reconfigure networking support every time you recompile your kernel.

Support for ACX100/ACX111 drivers is maintained at the developers' Sourceforge site.

The definitive guide on installing the driver is at the House Of Craig site.