Windows Vista Sound

Why do I see it mentioned nowhere that the Windows Vista sound to ask for Administrator approval is actually a sound from Star Trek TNG to memo or call an officer on Enterprise?? Apparently there's some trekkie in Windows group who thought this would be cool. But unfortunately when Vista asks for Admin approval it dims the whole damn screen and really pisses everyone off - I think it might actually be the most annoying feature of Windows Vista. Sad how they can take a good thing and make it bad...

chain reaction

I've gone into a Linux package-install chain reaction of sorts.. each package I want to install needs another basic package and I've gone one downloading and building sources so much that I've forgotten what it is that I wanted to install in the first place! Only in Linux! :))

OpenSUSE - missing gcc?

Just after observing how good suse is, I'm surprised to see that it doesn't even have a basic C compiler. I wanted to install Emacs (an editor I used to use at work and one I'm more comfortable with than vi) and when I did a quicj configuration check I found no cc or gcc! I was surprised that this distribution didn't come packaged with it.

When I tried to download the source code for gcc, I read that the system needed to have another basic C Compiler to compile the gcc source! Catch 22s all over the place! I was considering just downloading a binary release when I thought of using SUSE's own application installer software. That seemed to be much better. I first selected gcc and it included all dependent packages and downloaded and installed it. It didn't however let me know when the installation was done. That would have been a little more helpful. I was about to try the same process again before I tried invoking gcc from shell and it was there!

Then I thought of going ahead and installing emacs also from SUSE's application installer. It didn't get me the most recent release however - but something is better than nothing.

openSUSE is pretty good

Here I was trying to look up how to best format a new partition so that I can share data between Linux and Windows, when I look up the /windows folder and there it is! The whole Windows partition mounted and ready to be navigated! That's progress! In retrospect I remember seeing some mention of creating a mount-point named 'windows' when I was installing from the CD but who pays that much attention.. :D

I still had to mess around to get the Wireless connection working though.  I have a broadcom modem and SUSE had to download some files from repositories online. It was a vicious circle - I had to go online to go online! So:
- I looked up the script
- found out what files were needed to install the broadcom firmware
- downloaded them manually in Windows
- copied it to a USB flash drive
- copied from the flash drive to Linux partition (after rebooting of course)
- and then made the script point to these files instead of the URL.

Phew! That worked though. It had, of course, to be followed by the usual:

ifconfig wlan0 up
/etc/init.d/network restart

Pretend you have more CD/DVD drives than you do

Mounting images on a Virtual CD/DVD drive is pretty handy. I tried Magic ISO to first create a virtual drive. Turns out it needed something called 'MagicDisc'. MagicISO itself was sweet enough to link me to the page where I could download that extra bit of software. Then first I set the number of drives. You can set it to as many as 5 drives I think! I set it to 1 for testing. Then in Magic ISO go to Tools->Virtual CD/DVD options and then choose the drive where you want to mount an image. Then choose the image you want to mount - it has an accepted list of image types. I tried a .bin image and it nicely mounted it as a CD drive and auto play options came up. Pretty efficient. I don't know if there are better software to mount images but this one sure works.

Software Bundling

I don't like that some software companies bundle other software (sometimes not even related to the one we want to install) with their package. But I used to like it when they at least gave us the option of refusing to install any other software. Now even that freedom has been revoked and that is irritating!

I recently updated my adobe reader from version 9 to Adobe Reader X. Adobe also installed Mc Afee security software and went right ahead installing it without asking me! Now I have to go separately and uninstall that program. We have the rug of freedom pulled from right under us without noticing..

Read Out Loud

I tried using the text-to-speech feature on Adobe. It was really nice. But the document that I used was not structured right and the audio didn't seem to be fully understandable.

Here are the instructions for using the read out loud feature on Adobe.

It was pretty decent, for ex. it paused when it encountered a comma. I need to test it out a little more but its doing wonders for accessibility..