My brother in law asked me to fix his Sheevaplug. No component damage visible, but it was clear there was something wrong with the PSU. Found a 2.2A/5V adapter in a box, and opened its case. A bit too big to fit in the Sheeva, but the dremel managed to make it a snug fit.
Soldered the wires from the Sheeva to the new PSU….et voila…the Sheeva boots up again.
My brother in law is happy again 
After getting some MS security patches on my XP box at work a while ago (april 2009) , I encountered problems while starting Oracle JDeveloper. The message I got was: Unable to create an instance of the Java Virtual Machine
A workaround is limiting the maximum heap size of your application to e.g. 512M instead of 1024M. Eventually you’ll run in to trouble while developing larger applications. This also applies to other Java applications such as Tomcat.
After doing some research, I’ve managed to pinpoint the responsible security patch.
KB972260 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972260
There is no real fix for this issue. The only one is uninstalling this security fix, and hide it inside Windows Update to prevent that you are getting bothered over and over again. Both Microsoft and Sun have been informed by users, but have not taken any actions.
In addition to the above:
MS has recently released a new IE7 patch. Too bad this patch also breaks Java related stuff. Patch: KB974455
And another one:
KB976325
During my quest finding the perfect GNU/Linux distribution for my daily computing needs during the last 13 years, I have ran into Sabayon Linux. Sabayon 4.2 to be precise. You can get it in two flavours a KDE and a GNOME flavour.
I don’t care about either of those two. I want to use XFCE this time.
Because Sabayon doesn’t come in an XFCE flavour, you’ll have to choose GNOME or KDE to startup with.
I have chosen KDE….but GNOME is fine too.
During installation you’ll have the option to chose the kind of installation. Or KDE (or Gnome on the GNOME DVD), or XBMC, or FluxBox, or blablablabla.
Obviously no XFCE there either…..Because I wanted a clean starting point, I chose to go for the FluxBox installation.
That way I would have a minimal and more important clean installation perfect for installing XFCE later on.
The installation is pretty straight forward. Not very much additional choices that can be made.
After installation the idea of the clean installation went up in flames.
Despite the fact that I chose for the FluxBox installation a lot of KDE stuff was installed.
Ah well….we can uninstall the useless stuff later on, as I did.
Sabayon 4.2 does a good job handling all my notebook’s hardware. Everything is detected and it all works out of the box. No need to install the Nvidia drivers…they are already there and just work. No need to fiddle with my soundchip….it just works. Just install XFCE and you’re ready to go. Thumbs up to Sabayon!
A few things I had to alter to the configuration to get rid of some annoyances:
* System bell/beep
One of the most anoying things while working in the terminal on Linux is the system bell.
Especially if you like to use tab (auto-completion) and you don’t have an exact match.
On Sabayon (not sure if it is Sabayon or my M1330) the beep isn’t a real beep. It’s even more annoying.
It’s some sort of high pitched chicken. Had to get rid of that one….fast.
You can easily achieve that by editing the following items:
- Uncomment the “#set bell-style none” to make it look like “set bell-style none” or if you like “set bell-style visual” in the file /etc/inputrc.
This disables the beep in the consoles after reboot.
- Add “/usr/bin/xset -b b 0″ to some of the possible places for this. Like your X session manager of xinitrc.
- Add “blacklist pcspkr” to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file.
This disables the pcspkr kernel module after a reboot.
* Trackpad
The M1330 has a fairly small trackpad. Sabayon by default has trackpad scrolling enabled on the edges of the pad. I don’t like that. If you want to disable this, open “/etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi”. In this file you’ll see four lines that say something about scrolling. Depending on your needs set the ones you don’t like to “false”. I personally disabled all…..what a relief.
Sitting in my garden this morning, recovering from some sort of flu (probably not the swine type). It’s still a little chill outside, but with the sun on me it is very nice. Life is coming back in the garden after the winter. Seen a green frog, some dragonflies, two butterflies, a toad and a dog in the garden. The dog isn’t a rare species in the garden
A quickfix for one annoying Firefox 3 behavior. Since version 3 Firefox has the ability to detect if the networkmanager in Linux is connected to a network. If so, then Firefox will pop in to online mode, otherwise it will go into offline mode.
Very annoying if you’re sitting in the train using wvdial (or any other dialer outside networkmanager) to connect to a 3G network, and have to disable offlline mode over and over again.
This workaround will keep your Firefox in online mode:
Your Firefox will not pop into offline mode by itself anymore.