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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Sun, 30 Mar 2008

Alt-key Xterm
blog

I'm posting this so I can find it easier the next time I look for it (although I swear I did this same thing two yeras ago...) When your alt key isn't working as it should in an xterm, add the following to .Xdefaults:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true
XTerm*eightBitInput: false

Then 'xrdb -merge' it and fire up a new xterm (or better yet, rxvt). Now your alt key is ok!

Sat, 29 Mar 2008

FriendFeed
blog

I joined friendfeed.

Tue, 25 Mar 2008

More Mac Tips
blog

Some more things that I'm finally figuring out with the mac...

I love the new keyboard that comes with macs... it's a great laptop-style feel that makes typing very pleasant. One of the annoying things, though, is that it takes a few liberties with the keys. To be specific... there's no 'Insert' key on the keyboard at all. In place of it is a 'fn' key that allows you to use mac-specific bindings on the F-keys, such as volume adjustment, iTunes controls, etc...

I use the insert key a lot, though, because pairing it with 'shift' will do a 'paste' when I'm using X11. I missed that, so I finally got around to creating a .Xmodmap file (on my mac and my various linux VMs and boxes) that simply maps the F13 key to 'Insert':

keycode 113 = Insert

Speaking of X11 (guess what I've been messing with lately?), if you're trying to figure out why your middle mouse button doesn't work as paste, check your USB OverDrive settings because it defaults the middle (scroll-wheel, usually) click to 'AutoScroll' instead of a button click. Who uses auto-scroll?

Hmm... I guess that's it. I thought I had three but apparently not.

Sat, 15 Mar 2008

Back to the Zaurus
blog :: zaurus

Well, I went back to the Mac so I figured I'd keep going back to old favorites and pulled out the Zaurus SL-C1000 (akita) again. Great little machine -- I had a lot of fun with it a few years ago just messing around with it and using it as my daily PDA.

Recently I've been tempted to get an ipod Touch... I thought it'd be nice to have to play music at work, watch random videos (screencasts, shows I record, etc...)

So I'm back at it. Never satisfied with what's easy, I've chosen to try and build my own image so that I can ultimately customize it for what I need. I could take the "easy" way out and use the pdaXrom that is available but I've never been able to build anything for it so I'd be a mere user of it. I, apparently, can't handle being "just" a user, so I must build things.

Since I've switched to my iMac, I just happen to have a system here that used to run Windows not doing anything. Yet.

I found an old 30gb drive and installed the latest ubuntu on it. I picked ubuntu because a) it's a quick and easy install, and b) it's based on debian which a bunch of the OpenEmbedded / Angstrom folks use. And believe me, the name of the game is "use what other people use" when it comes to openembedded. I've had trouble in the past getting it going and I wanted to avoid that this time.

Long story short... it took about 8 hours, but in the end I had compiled a couple images (base, console, and x11) for my akita. Pretty darn cool. I was well on my way to creating my poor-man's ipod Touch.

Until I actually booted my image and found that id didn't work. Bah. I think it's because I didn't choose to build the "-stable" version of the codebase. Instead I went with the "dev" version which, of course, isn't fully tested. Looking beyond the fact that it didn't work, I was pretty encouraged by the fact that everything compiled, so I considered it a success anyhow.

Fast forward a bit and as I type I'm in stalling the new "console image" that I just built from the -stable branch. I had that compile overnight (it's really 3/15 as I type this). I'm fairly positive it will work since I've used an Angstrom distro image from before that worked completely. It must have been built off the -stable branch, just like this one will be. As I'm trying the console image the x11 image is compiling away... should be doe shortly. Just getting the console image going will be nice because I can at least use it as a starting point for possibly a custom image with just my media player stuff (mplayer, maybe quasar).

Ok, image loaded, Zaurus is rebooting... Angstrom has a nice bootsplash but sometimes I just like seeing init.d do its thing.

And it works! Keyboard works, wireless card is recognized but I still have to manually configure it but that shouldn't be a problem. Very cool. More later!

Sun, 02 Mar 2008

Quick rdesktop Tip
blog

So this has been bugging me for a bit and I finally figured it out.

When I'm using rdesktop (either via 'rdesktop' or 'tsclient') from my ubuntu VM through VPN to work I use emacs a lot, either for email on on my Windows machine, or through VNC to my linux machine. (A sidenote -- yes, that would be the following path: iMac -> Ubuntu VM (VMware Fusion) -> rdesktop to Win XP -> VNC to linux machine which is actually another VMware instance running on a larger linux install. Yikes!)

Anyhow. A common key combination I use is alt + < (M-<). It turns out that the order you hold down the shift and alt keys matters. If you don't get it right, all of a sudden the windows machine you're connecting to acts as if its windows key is always down (which explains a previous post of mine from a month ago).

The fix for this is quite simple. I found it, of all places, "hidden" in the rdesktop mailing list.

Yet another problem solved! Now if only I could just use my mac at work...

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