I found myself trapped within a Vinagre Remote Desktop Viewer VNC session to a remote Linux server console. Trying all keys to find the magic key to pop mouse control back to my local Linux system, finally I found it: the F10 key! In the mean time, I had found the key to make the Vinagre on-line help come up, was navigating through it using keyboard only... and what few help suggestions there were, they always told to go to the Vinagre menu to click on something...

I knew how to add my favorite screensaver, Skyrocket, to Xubuntu based on having researched it before: http://www.lueckdatasystems.com/Adding_back_Skyrocket_screen_saver_to_Ub... However this time, the Really Slick Screensavers GLX Port entries did not show up in the list of screensavers. So I went searching how to get them to become available.

I discovered in this file:

that I should perform the following:

I was quite perplexed at what kept touching / editing the /etc/resolv.conf file on a server I was setting up. A web search turned up suggestions that perhaps this OS configuration included Network Manager, which when installed becomes responsible for that file. I checked and Network Manager was not on any of the available servers I could check, including the server with the issue.

I found other suggestions to simply use the chattr command thusly:

I offered a presentation at the 2011 ICCM conference about our work implementing CiviCRM running on Drupal this past year for Christians in Recovery. The presentation includes a general overview of CiviCRM's capabilities, and also how the CIR site is making use of CiviCRM.

Presentation in PDF format

Recently my trusty Microsoft Windows 2000 computers requested to apply Security Update For Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 / 2008. At first I thought how kind of Microsoft to even include Windows 2000.

Boy was I mistaken! Horror of horrors, said updates are not compatible with Windows 2000! If you get bit too, here is how you easily go back:

Some time ago, I was lamenting that Bash did not have something comparable to PARSE found in Rexx / Open Object Rexx. Shortly I received a reply from Dallas Legan that he had built a tool capable of exposing the power of PARSE and allow it to be used within Bash scripts. That concept totally rocks! That tool may be found here:

"A Simple, General Command Line Filter In REXX"
http://www.scoug.com/os24u/2001/scoug010.parsetool.html

Recently I had found that it is far more reliable to connect CUPS on client workstations directly to CUPS on a Linux server rather than getting Samba involved. (Blog post here) With that in mind, I went searching for how to do the same for Windows workstations. Microsoft calls such capabilities "Internet Printing" within Windows, and it is very easy to have the same success with Windows machines.

For some time I had been of the opinion that sending emails from the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) simply had to be more complicated than with Windows using Blat. Not so! Over the weekend I learned of sendEmail which offers equivalent functionality.

There is a nasty / annoying bug in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Linux which prevents attaching USB storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDD) and Flash memory stick drives. With the assistance of others in the Ubuntu bug tracker system, I just arrived at a little script which successfully corrects the Plug-n-Play (PnP) detection problem. It is as follows, fixext_backup.sh:

Note: You need to run this script as root (aka sudo the script).

I recently got a bit bored with my usual Clearlooks GNOME theme. I wanted something with non-rounded controls and dark blue active title bars. Here is what I came up with.

1) First I added a couple of Ubuntu GNOME theme related packages. Both are required as Mist comes from one and Gion is in the other.

2) Next customize the Mist theme as follows:

System \ Preferences \ Appearance \ Mist \ Customize...