Just a thought: Linux is to computing what backpacking is to travel: Perhaps a little more involved to get started, but infinitely more satisfying, richer, more real and “down to the metal”, and a much more rewarding experience day after day. And the bliss of absolute freedom.
Mac OS X: All-inclusive pampering in some pseudo-hip resort with some “culturally aware” excursions thrown in.
Windows: Package holiday with the Joneses.
‘Nuff said.
Update: Since Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” Hal has superseded xserver/xorg.conf as the preferred means to configure input devices. This post has the settings for hal, and they work just like the old xorg.settings outlined in the original post. Migration to hal will likely bring benefits for most, such as plug-and-play hot plugging. You might want to check out this writeup before taking the plunge.
Original post (applies to xserver/xorg.conf < Ubuntu 8.10):
As you know I consider the Logitech Marble Mouse the Best Pointing Device, bar none. And the final tweak I wanted to enable the trackball to act as a scroll wheel. For Windows and those suffering from the generally horrid Logitech drivers and utilities (SetPoint anyone?), there’s Marble Mouse Scroll Wheel (original download page seems to be down recently, so here is another download link). But for my installation of Linux Mint/Ubuntu I had tried some advice from the web without success, to the point when X failed to load. Finally the approach suggested by linux (USA) in his Amazon review worked. It lets you use the right small button as a paste button and holding the left small button will let you use marble/ball as an omnidirectional scroll wheel. Here it goes:
You must edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (dont’ forget to backup with cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.bak), for xorg 6.8 the relevant settings look like this:
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″
Option “Buttons” “5″
Option “YAxisMapping” “4 2″
Option “XAxisMapping” “6 7″
Option “EmulateWheel” “yes”
Option “EmulateWheelButton” “4″EndSection
You also need to create an ~/.xmodmap file in your home directory and enter:
pointer = 1 5 3 4 2 6 7
With xorg 7.2 (released 15th Feb. 2007) and newer you have to remove the “YAxisMapping” and change the “EmulateWheelButton” to “8”, so that the entire section looks like this:
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″
Option “XAxisMapping” “6 7″
Option “EmulateWheel” “yes”
Option “EmulateWheelButton” “8″EndSection
Your ~/.xmodmap file will have to contain this:
pointer = 1 9 3 4 5 6 7 8 2 10 11
instead of the above. The protocol setting “ExplorerPS/2” is also important to get the buttons to work even though the device is connected via USB.
To enable horizontal scrolling in Firefox you’ll have to go to the about:config page and set:
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action 0
The ~/.xmodmap file will likely be loaded automatically when you start your system, but if not you might have to create a ~/.xinitrc file. This page has more info, and here’s more info about monitoring your buttons using the xev utility. Hope it helps.
The Netbeans 6.1 editor seems to have problems displaying UTF-8 encoded files (Linux Mint Daryna, Ubuntu Feisty), so a source file with Thai (and probably Chinese, Japanese etc.) will look like this if project encoding is set to UTF-8:
Changing font, project properties etc. won’t help, so before messing around to much and risking possible data corruption, here’s a workaround: Use Quanta Plus for editing, a fantastic editor I find myself using more and more and which hasn’t let me down. Here’s the section in Quanta Plus:
Both editors will pick up each other’s edits, so it’s a cinch to use them simultaneously to edit the same files.
To delete all files in the current directory, you run the extremely dangerous
rm *
and
rm -rf *
to recursively remove all files and directories.
However, the command has a 128K buffer limitation in the Linux Kernel. As a workaround you can pipe each file to rm like so:
find . -name ‘*’ | xargs rm
See this article for details.
Many have tried, all have failed (at least to meet some or most of their expectations); in the quest to find a decent and feature-rich native Linux desktop blog editor, anything that can match the outstanding and free Windows Live Writer. The latter of course won’t run on Linux via Wine, unlike another option: After a long and arduous install/try/remove cycle with most Linux blog editors, I have to agree with this article: in the end you’ll end up with BlogJet and install it this way:
As first suggested here for Zoundry, it works with BlogJet as well and is endorsed by its creator: Get IEs4Linux and from WITHIN IE go to File>Open [All Files] and run the downloaded BlogJet installer:
Not sure if you’ll need the mfc42.dll file as suggested in the Zoundry article. After a quick install you’ll have a fast and well-designed blog editor on your Linux system which is almost as good as Windows Live Writer at most everyday blogging tasks.
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