Colemak layout

Ya I know that this is after a long time. I am sorry as I was busy with some mundane tasks. So here is the news : I have switched my keyboard layout to "colemak". This saves me from RSI and promises to increase my typing speed as well. The speed factor is yet to be verified by me, but the RSI is certainly true. I followed cold turkey approach and it started showing results in 3-4 days. The biggest positive point is remapping Caps key to Backspace key, which itself reduces right pinky movement a lot. In debian it is as easy as these scripts that I am using.

#### file: ~/bin/switch_keyboard_layout_colemak.sh ####
setxkbmap us -variant colemak
xset r 66

#### file: ~/bin/switch_keyboard_layout_qwerty.sh ####
setxkbmap us;
xset -r 66

Reference : http://colemak.com/

A new browser based on chromium.

Should check this link. I dont know how much of this is true and how much it is an intrusion in our privacy.

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

Besides this if you want to try out a chromium based browser then can download the chromiium iron from the same page. I have not yet tested the browser myself but will certainly do that. It seems that I should read the full agreement before clicking "I Accept".

++EDIT++
A friend of mine sent this link.
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=114836&hl=en
So its not a problem anymore, The only thing remains is the default ON options for such things. I thing that while installing chrome, these options should be asked for. And for the iron chromium, they should tell how to disable these options.

unp : The universal de-compressor

For a person who spends a considerable amount of his time on computers, its really PITA to use different uncompress programs for wide variety of formats like zip, tar, gz etc etc available on the net. So when you download so many packages in so many formats, then just to uncompress them out, you try tar xvzf to find out that Oh! its not a gz archive. I found a better utilty for this purpose which works for almost all the tar/zip formats available. And its available on debian repo.

# aptitude install unp

And use it just like
$ unp x.gz
$ unp x.tar.gz
$ unp x.tgz
$ unp x.zip
$ unp x.bz2

So njoy!

the great Mark

Though this is not about linux/debian or anything like that. But here is the case:

You write a book, put it in GPL and somebody prints it and sells it and makes profit out of it. How will you feel ?

Read out to know how does the writer of dive-into-python thinks. After reading you will feel that the Title of this post is justified.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point

apt-get/aptitude

Many a times we mirror some iso-s of debian and put it on our laptops and/or local LAN to work as a repository. While installing it asks for authenicity of the packages.And we have to press/write 'Yes' all of the time. To get rid of this we can just write the following in /etc/apt/apt.conf

APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1 ;

And please mind the spaces.

gnome-mount

Okay I agree that I dont use gnome/gnome-mount anymore. I have switched to halevt. But yesterday an acquaintance of mine (using gnome) ran into a problem. Her machine was not able to automount the usb thumb disks. I tried my hand for sometime making the normal user a member of some groups. But still it didn't work. Then I tried logging into root and mounting from there. But no fruits. At last I searched on net and found a command line for gnome-mount

$ gnome-mount -v -b -d <device point>

This device point information is available from the command dmesg. So i replaced <device point> with sdb1 and it gave a slight hint that some thing with media directory is creating a problem (dont remember the actual message). So I checked the /etc/fstab file and somebody has created an entry for /media and /media/sdb in fstab. I removed those and everything started fine. So just a piece of advice:
"Documenting the changes your are making to your system on a simple sheet of paper can come handy many-a-times."

nfs-debian-squeeze-portmap-ext4

cryptic topic name?
Ya I know. But I was unable to find a better heading. I wasted my full week in searching for the solution of mounting nfs on the configuration of ext4+squeeze(debian)+nfs4. But was unable to do it. The reason was not obviuos due to my lack of networking knowledge (sorry I am a telecom+elex engg by degree). It was gving some rpc error. Finally i hit the nail. The problem was at the server from portmap as it was only listening to the localhost. I just opened /etc/default/portmap and commented the only uncommented line in it.

#OPTIONS="-i 127.0.0.1"

And just gave a restart to the machine. (I could have restarted portmap but the incidents/failures happened in last 1 week made me go for "the orthodox restart"). And voila everything (ok i agree - nfsmount :( ) started working on the client.
PS: The whole simple process is working fine on debian lenny release.