Tech & Geekery

Since I find myself often restoring the master boot record on my windows 7 machines due to various linux install/test/remove cycles, I've found the following process quite handy: from the windows 7 repair disk: bootrec /FixMbr will restore a Vista/7-compatible mbr to your system.  Has worked every time for me, but proceed with caution: messing with the boot record is a good way to get a system that won't start.

For some reason, on my network Samba never seems to work out of the box.  I've found that to be true with a series of Ubuntu releases and now with Fedora 15, as well.  I've always been able to get it working, though. 1. Install samba, samba-client. 2. Configure firewall to open ports for samba: 139/tcp,445/tcp,137/udp, 138/udp. 3. Add workgroup to /etc/samba/smb.conf workgroup=WORKGROUP  4. At this point I was able to connect using smbclient on the command line.  Unfortunately, Nautilus was still refusing to browse my network. 5. I had to add this to my smb.conf name resolve order = lmhosts wins bcast host After this, I was able to browse merrily.

Suspend doesn't work on my machine in Gnome 3.  After a lot of fruitless googling, I found the answer on ArchWiki.  (Trust Arch to get it right.)   Disable "Suspend" in the status menu A quick way to do it system-wide is to change line 153 of  /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/statusMenu.js .  This change takes effect the next time GNOME Shell is started. File:  /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/statusMenu.js // this._haveSuspend = this._upClient.get_can_suspend(); // Comment this line out. this._haveSuspend = false; // Use this line instead. However, the effect won't last after a GNOME update. A more perennial solution is to install the  alternative status menu .

Okay, so I use linux and wine, and often when I install a windows application I get a bunch of "wine core exe" entries in my "Open With" dialog in gnome.  The easy way to get rid of this problem is to do this: rm ~/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-* There are a bunch of desktop files in that directory.  This cleans them out and cleans up the menu. 

Quick-n-Dirty regex for matching Roman numerals.  Not perfect, but good enough... ^[XVIL]+$