Linux Notes

What's on this page: DistrosThe different versions of Linux that are available Help for newbiesPlaces to turn when you can't figure it out Chinese inputHow to write Chinese characters with your Linux system Other useful pagesMore places that have been helpful to me Other projectsMore things I'd like to do with Linux Miscellaneous other Linux thingsGeneral sites, funny bits

This page contains a few Chinese characters in UTF-8 encoding. I have a few increasingly out of date notes about how to get your browser to display Chinese, in you're interested.

There are gajillions of Linux sites out there, and as with so many trends, I'm starting into this one once it has already gotten a firm grip on the public consciousness. Nonetheless, I've recently gotten Linux running, and there may just be people who are interested in my take on things. Most importantly, I've found a lot of helpful resources so far, and someone might like to know what they are.

The sections of this page are listed to the left.

Distros

There are so many dang distributions of Linux, it's crazy. There's Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Knoppix, Lindows... the list goes on. The one I use is Mandrake, which is considered by many to be the most foolproof (and idiotproof) distribution. Here are my thoughts about the few distros I've tried:

• Red Hat.

  This was the first distro I tried. Thousands of people have had tremendous success with it, but when I tried installing it, it refused to recognize my mouse. I had bought a boxed edition of Red Hat -- the Workstation edition, I think -- so I expected to get some helpful service when I went into their website. Instead, I found forums full of other confused and frustrated newbies, just like me, and no help anywhere. I couldn't find any way to contact customer service for help. I eventually found mention of "service tickets" but none of them in the box I had bought nor any way to "redeem" them. A very bad first experience with Linux, but I persevered...

• Knoppix.

  I found a pre-burned basic edition of Knoppix at a computer books store here in Taibei and bought it (for something like US$1.00). When I popped it in my CD-ROM drive, it just worked. It was amazing. Suddenly, Linux seemed like a realistic possibility. However, I wasn't very interested in installing Knoppix as my distribution. I had heard much better things about...

• Mandrake.

  My friend Claire had recommended this distro to me as a good beginners' distro (she uses Debian). I took her advice, and I've really appreciated it. There are lots of problems -- doing Chinese input on a BBS required editing some rather obscure files and lots of hairpulling before I could figure out how to do it, and the basic Chinese input system leaves much to be desired. Further, the touted rpmdrake system (which helps you download and install programs) is far from perfect. However, overall, I'd have to say that Mandrake has been a positive experience. Many people would frown on me for using such a pedestrian distro, but I'm really not interested in fighting with my OS -- I just want things to work, and Mandrake does that pretty well.

  Update, November 2006: Mandrake/Mandriva worked pretty well for several years, but then I upgraded to 2007 and... arg. It didn't work very well at all. Lots of broken packages (including Firestarter, XEphem and Gweled); even more stupidity setting up my Wacom tablet; vague improvements to Menudrake but at least as many problems introduced; etc. Bleah.

• Ubuntu.

  This is the distro with all the buzz as of late 2006. Sometimes, the buzz is for a good reason; Ubuntu really is good stuff. The install is in some ways easier than Mandriva's (which has always been praised for its good installation); once you get your system running... well, I can't think of anything that Mandriva does better. There were a couple little hiccups at the start -- Ubuntu doesn't install gtk2-engines-pixbuf by default, so my main theme didn't work, but installing that package instantly solved the problem; and Ubuntu seems not to have a native firewall, though I think IPTables is enabled by default. And that's pretty much nothing compared to the troubles I had with Mandriva.

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Help for newbies

Am I a newbie to Linux? You better believe it. I still don't know my way around a shell script, and I only just got mplayer to run. And what I've managed to do so far has mostly been with the help of lots of help sites out there:

• Linux Questions.org.

  This has been a lifesaver many, many times. There are forums for everything, and extremely helpful people who give advice just because they're nice people. It's amazing.

• Ubuntu Forums.

  Friendly and very helpful. Lots of good answers and nice people.

• Ubuntu Guide.

  A very easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to setting up lots of the basic things in Ubuntu: being able to play DVDs, getting your Nvidia card's drivers set up, installing package repositories, etc. Every distro should have something like this.

• SGI's man page search engine.

  SGI, the people who make those excellent graphics computers, also have an extremely useful page that allows you to search for and view man (manual) pages for Linux commands. If, like me, you hate looking at the man help pages on a terminal, you may find this useful.

• The Basics @ An Introduction to Command-line Linux.

  There's a lot out there on how to program in C++ or how to mount a new hard drive or whatever, but what if you just want to copy a file, move a directory or display a directory's contents, one page at a time? Then you need to know the eleven basic commands described at the above page. I wish more of the documentation for Linux was written like this -- clear, yet assuming nothing.

• The Linux Documentation Project.

  It's a bit overwhelming, but if you have the patience, most of the answers you need are here.

• Open Office.org Resource Kit, by Solveig Haugland & Floyd Jones.

  I have been using Open Office.org as my main office suite since I got Mandrake up and running. I have to say, it's quite good. The implementation of styles is much better than Word's, in my opinion; the makers of OO assume you'll use styles, not that styles are a random geeky add-on that few users will touch. Even in Word2000, the styles menu is far from being as simple and straightforward as OO's. OpenOffice also does a good job with templates, and its handling of tables and columns is far less nutty than Word's. (How many times have you inserted a table in Word then tried to put text before or after it, only to discover that Word has decided the table should exist on its own separate level of existence? OO has none of those problems.) OO Draw is a great program -- a large chunk of the functions of Corel Draw or Illustrator or whatever for $0.00. File sizes for OO files are tiny, and OpenOffice does a great job of making PDF files, even in the 1.0.2 release.

  That's not to say there are no problems, however. It's slow to start, and paging through the font list takes forever. Also, since I installed it in Chinese, figuring out what everything says is rather difficult. (Though, of course, that's not the fault of the Open Office.org people at all.) The biggest problem, however, is that Open Office.org's documentation is terrible. The forums at OOoDocs.org are very good, but still, there are tons of things they can't cover. For all those questions, so far at least, the Open Office.org Resource Kit has been the answer to my prayers.

  Haugland & Jones have so far answered all my questions very succinctly, and there's a quite good index as well. They have great sections on macros, customizing toolbars, exporting PDF and linked frames. They also have tons of things I don't need yet or haven't wanted yet like vector graphics (Draw looks almost as good as the program of the same name from Corel), mail merges and complex formulae. A very good book.

• Running Linux, by Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Terry Dawson and Lar Kaufman.

  I have been using my sparse little Mandrake 7.2 manuals for a while, but they don't do much. I got Mandrake as pre-burnt ISO's with a Mandrake book in Chinese, and I've been too lazy/stressed out to figure out everything in Chinese. So I needed a decent overall manual for using Linux in English. I wanted to buy a SAMS Teach Yourself Mandrake Linux in 24 Hours book -- I have had great luck with Laura LeMay's Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours book in the same series -- but a) there doesn't seem to be one in print, and b) every review I've read of SAMS' Linux books has been negative. So then what?

  It was mostly a choice between buying a book about Red Hat, or buying a book about generic Linux. I decided against Red Hat -- Mandrake and Red Hat share the RPM structure, but there may not be much else, and I didn't want to risk it -- so I decided on something generic. There are tons of generic Linux manuals, so which one? Well, the O'Reilly series seems pretty popular, so I checked it out. They have two main generic Linux books: Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell. I eventually bought both, but to start with, Running Linux was definitely more friendly for a newbie. I've only been using Running Linux for a short time, but it hasn't disappointed me yet. (Well, okay, the index isn't quite comprehensive enough, but otherwise, no disappointments yet.)

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Chinese input systems

The main reason I finally decided to get Linux running on this computer was that I wanted to be able to access a local (Taiwanese) BBS. This meant that I needed software to read and write Chinese characters; my old OS, Win98, was in English and wasn't equipped to deal with Chinese. Now, I've got Mandrake running with the Taiwanese locale module and Chinese input works pretty well (though not perfectly). How did I get it running?

• Chinese input Howto.

  This was clearly not written by a native English speaker, but it's pretty thorough nonetheless. It goes over the main steps in getting Chinese input set up on your Linux system.

• Gentoo Chinese Localisation Guide.

  This is probably the best single guide to the different Chinese input systems available. (The howto above is getting old and doesn't really discuss different input systems.) This page was written for Gentoo (yet another distro), but most of it is applicable for all Linux distros. By the same author, there's an excellent review of the various Chinese fonts available for Linux.

• Chinese Language Extensions.

  CLE is basically a group of RPM's related to Chinese language use in Linux. CLE seems to be mentioned in most Red Hat Chinese distributions as a major addition, but they don't appear to support Mandrake RPM's and, more importantly for my purposes, they only seem to support XCIN.

• XCIN.

  This is the standard Chinese input system in Mandrake 9.1 Chinese for Taiwan. It leaves a lot to be desired -- it has too many input methods, none of which are intelligent, and a tendency not to go away when I tell it to. It also hasn't been updated since 2000. Luckily, as of February 2004, I've gotten SCIM to work, so I'm no longer using XCIN.

• Chinput.

  Another input system, one that looks quite good, but I've never managed to get it working because I don't know how to make it the default input system.

  Update, March 2004: I got Chinput to work on my new/old Mandrake installation. Again, I don't know what I managed to tweak, and I can't get it to operate in two-character/word-based mode, but it's working nonetheless.

  I'll eventually try to do some howto's re: Chinput, but for now, here are a few little tips:

  • How do you do umlauted u's in Chinput? Type "uu". The old v = ü trick won't work.

  Update, May 2004: As usual, I don't know what I did, but I somehow got SCIM (see below) working on my system. Unless something goes horribly wrong, I won't be using Chinput anymore.

• Smart Common Input Method.

  Somehow, I'm not sure how, I got this installed. It's a great system, though the documentation leaves a little to be desired. (I'm working on that.) This is one of the best Chinese input systems around, because it offers so-called "intelligent Pinyin input" -- that is, Pinyin-based input that slowly 'learns' what words you use.

  Getting it installed was, as with many big projects in Linux, a real headache. There seems to be be a lot of conflicting information about how to install it. James Su, the creator of SCIM, has lots of documentation about the program, and there are even some pretty good forums that he frequents, but it seems like a lot of the solutions aren't universal; either something is screwy about my installation of Mandrake/Gnome/SCIM/something else, or there are further mysterious abysses of Linux that I just haven't plumbed.

  Here is a preliminary guide to installing SCIM in traditional Chinese localization on Mandrake 9.1 under Gnome:

  • First, make sure you're in traditional Chinese localization. If you weren't already, run LocaleDrake, which should be in Gnome > Configuration > Other. It's possible to run SCIM without having Chinese localization, but I don't know how. If necessary, you might want to create another user account that you only use for Chinese, such as me_chinese or whatever.

  • Next, install SCIM from RPM's. You can install it yourself, but why bother? If you're installing SCIM to do Chinese input, that means that you have to install four packages:

    • The main program itself. As of February 2004, this was scim-0.9.0-1.i586.rpm.
    • The Chinese tables, which contain all the characters. Currently, this is scim-tables-zh-0.3.1-1.noarch.rpm.
    • The actual Intelligent Pinyin part of the program. This is scim-chinese-0.2.7-1.i586.rpm, currently.
    • The thing that lets it all work under Gnome: scim-gtk2-immodule-0.8.2-1ul1.i386.rpm.

    All these packages are available at the SCIM homepage. Naturally, if more current versions are available, it's probably a good idea to use them instead.

  • The only configuration file -- the only one -- you should need to change to get SCIM working in Mandrake 9.1 is ~/.i18n. If you didn't know (I didn't before a very kind person told me), ~/ means whatever your home directory is: /home/me/ or whatever. Check your home directory, and make sure hidden files are shown; any file that starts with a dot, such as .i18n, will be hidden until you do so. If you already have a file called .i18n, modify it; if not, create it.

    If you check on the Net for how to configure SCIM, you'll probably see a lot of mentions of /etc/sysconfig/i18n, /etc/X11/xinit/xinitirc, /etc/X11/xinit/XIM or ~/.xinitrc. Under Mandrake, you do not need to change any of these; the .i18n file in your home directory is enough.

    Change .i18n to read as follows:

    LANGUAGE=zh_TW.UTF-8:zh_TW:zh_HK:zh
    LANG=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_ADDRESS=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_COLLATE=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_NAME=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_NUMERIC=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_TIME=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_MEASUREMENT=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_MESSAGES=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_IDENTIFICATION=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_TELEPHONE=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_MONETARY=zh_TW.UTF-8
    LC_PAPER=zh_TW.UTF-8
    CONSOLE_NOT_LOCALIZED=yes
    ENC=utf8
    XIM_PROGRAM=scim
    XIM=scim
    GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
    XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"
    

    If you were using KDE, you'd be home by now; that's all you need to get SCIM running in KDE. However, Gnome requires a couple more steps.

  • You now have get GTK (the basis of the Gnome interface) working correctly with SCIM. Open a terminal and do this command: gtk-query-immodules-2.0 > /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules.
  • Next, re-start Gnome. SCIM should now be your Chinese input system.
  • Some programs may give you trouble with SCIM, however. The biggest one is OpenOffice.org; when using SCIM, you may find that the cursor suddenly starts jumping around to places it shouldn't be. The way to deal with this is to turn off On-The-Spot mode; go into the SCIM configuration menu, then XIM, and turn off OnTheSpot (in Chinese, 在遊標處顯示輸入狀態. You'll then need to re-start SCIM, which may mean restarting Gnome.
  • Every once in awhile, SCIM will stop working for whatever reason. (It's not perfectly stable, but it's still much better than XCIN.) So far, the only remedy for this that I've found is to login again, although sometimes killing the SCIM processes with kill -9 and then restarting SCIM in a terminal with scim works, too.
  • Also, on my system, SCIM sometimes doesn't respond very fast. It may takes several seconds to display characters you've input. Unfortunately, the only thing to do here is to wait; it is processing the characters, just slowly.

  Update, May 2004: Since coming back to the US, I've been using Chinput on my machine because, for some reason, SCIM wasn't working. I recently got fed up with the inability to do simplified Chinese as well as traditional characters in Chinput, though, so I tried SCIM again. It worked very smoothly. There were no complaints about missing/incorrect dependencies at all. And, as an added bonus, you can disable input methods from with the configuration program:

  • Right click on the SCIM icon in your system tray.
  • Click on "configure", aka 設定
  • Click on "function", aka 功能
  • Click off/on the input types you want.
  • Restart SCIM. This usually means logging in again, aka restarting Gnome, because SCIM doesn't die very gracefully.

  Now that's good interface design! James is doing good work on SCIM.

  Update, November 2006: I've now been using Ubuntu for a month or so and it works beautifully. I've actually set Ubuntu to load into English but also load SCIM so I can do Chinese input any time I need. (Weird finally being able to read what all the sub-menus in the GIMP say in English!)

• How to get onto a Chinese BBS using telnet

  My main purpose in installing Mandrake 9.1 in the first place was to get onto a Taiwanese BBS. I have some gaming contacts there, and didn't want to either a) always go to an Internet cafe to use their BBS systems or b) hook up my new computer to the Internet (I like to use it for computer games and 3D CGI only). So I installed Mandrake 9.1 in Taiwanese Chinese/Mandarin.

  How do I get onto the BBS? This information may not be available elsewhere in English, so I should provide it.

  • Get Mandrake 9.1 installed with Chinese/Taiwan as the locale. If you're doing something different, I don't know how to help you -- sorry.
  • Open the file /usr/bin/X11/crxvt.
  • Go to line 209. Change the contents to read something like @im=$XIM-zh_TW.
  • You may also need to change line 65 to read XIM=xcin-zh_TW, although this may already be set up.
  • To actually telnet into a BBS, go into CRXVT (a Chinese-compatible terminal). Type telnet -L address.of.the.bbs. For example, with the BBS I always go onto, it would be telnet -L vip.kkcity.com.tw.
  • Your terminal should then connect to the BBS, and you should be able to do Chinese input by starting XCIN (or whatever your input system is) and hitting ctrl+space.

  I would never have been able to figure this out were it not for a post on a Chinese Usenet group. If you're still unable to get onto a BBS, there may be other reasons I haven't gone into. Check the other Chinese howto pages for more on this, or do a search on Google Groups for the relevant terms.

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Other helpful pages

Here are some other pages that have been very helpful to me in figuring things out:

• Linux USB Support for Casio QV and Exilim Digital Still Cameras.

  My digital camera is an old-ish Casio QV 2900UX, which is rather annoying because none of the digital camera-interface programs that come with Mandrake include it as a preset. In order to download my photos, I had to mount the camera manually as /dev/sda1. I would never have figured out how to do this without the benefit of this very helpful page.

• Easy URPMI.

  For newbies like me who don't know how to set up their RPM sources, this site is a lifesaver.

• rpmfind.net.

  If you want to find an RPM and it isn't on one of the standard mirrors, this site can help you find it.

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Projects yet to be done

There are many other things I want to get done (and things I want to get) in Linux. Things I need to have done before I can consider this install to be up to par with my Windows system.

• More games

  The selection of games for Linux is good, even great considering that they're free -- but they still aren't the best. Maybe I should go onto E-bay and buy some old Loki games, but I doubt they will deliver to Taiwan. Instead, I'm pretty much stuck with the games I can download. I've tried installing XConq, Battle for Wesnoth and Vegastrike, but they've all given me installation errors. And I really wish FreeCiv had decent AI -- I hate being at war all the time, and I don't know who I could play a game with.

  Update: As of early 2004, I've gotten Wesnoth and Vegastrike to work on my machine. I'm not sure what caused the problems before; I've created a new user account to deal with some Gnome problems since I last tried to install them, so that may explain it. I haven't tried installing Xconq again, but I expect that should go smoothly, too.

  Update, June 2005: I've now got Freeciv 2.0 running on my machine and I love it. Hexes instead of squares, decent AI, a sort-of implementation of Civ III's borders -- it's a really great update to the game. There's lots of room for improvement, but still, this is the first Freeciv that I've actually liked playing.

  update, November 2006: I finally got Cedega (the non-free version of Wine) running. I only ever got Civilization III running under it -- Morrowind, Master of Orion II, Sim City 3000 and other things just refused to install. But even just Civ III is worth running. I recently moved to Ubuntu and haven't tried to get Cedega running under it yet, but I expect I'll want to soon.

• Perfect HTML editor

  At one time, my main HTML editor was Quanta. It has good highlighting and some very nice tag-closing features, but I've never been a fan of the KDE interface, and Quanta doesn't (didn't?) deal well with two-byte characters (i.e., Chinese). I used to use Bluefish, which has a Gnome-based interface and displays Chinese correctly but is a huge memory-hog and doesn't appear to do auto-end tags, too. Now I mostly just good ol' Gedit, which handles Chinese well but has a very jumpy cursor.

  I've tried Screem, which is also quite good but not perfect -- it doesn't (at least in the version I tried) allow for enough customization of the toolbars. I also looked at August, which seems a bit too basic for me, and Peacock and GINF, both of which seem a little too WYSIWYG for me.

• Font browser program

  In Windows, I use a nifty little program called Font Wrangler, which lists all the fonts on my system and more importantly allows me to print a nice list of them. Especially with Linux, where I'm dealing with 500+ fonts, it would be nice to have a printed reference. I tried Fontilus, but got installation errors; I tried Gnome Font Viewer but it doesn't print; I tried fnsam, but it just doesn't do anything. fnsam seems like the most promising one of the bunch, but until I learn a lot more about Linux -- enough to figure out what's wrong with fnsam -- I'm out of luck. Actually, I even tried making a manual list of fonts -- just by banging away at Open Office.org -- but even that didn't work.

  Update: As of December 2003, I've gotten Fontilus to install right (gotta love those RPM's). You can only get previews of all your fonts as root, which is kind of strange, but hey, it's better than nothing. There still doesn't seem to be any way to print the previews out, though, so instead I took screenshots and pasted them together in Scribus, then printed out the resulting document. It's quite an ugly, inelegant way to do it, but it works well enough.

  Update #2: As of January 2004, I got Gnome Font Viewer to work. It doesn't seem willing to print out more than a few pages of samples at a time, and selecting fonts to print out is kind of difficult, but otherwise, it's a great program. The samples are very nice, and it prints c. 40 different fonts per page.

• Embedded Quicktime and Java in Firefox

  I downloaded the Quicktime installer and everything, but when I do a "make" in the appropriate directory, I get a bunch of errors about parsing, non-existent directories, etc. As with many of my problems with Linux, I'm sure it would be completely obvious what's wrong to someone with a more advanced knowledge of Linux than I have, but at the level I'm at, it ain't obvious.

  Every time I go to a page with embedded Java, Firefox asks me if I want to install the correct plug-in. I've said yes a few times, but it never works. I've seen reports from other people with the same problem, so possibly, the Firefox folks will work on it.

  Update, June 2005: I've finally gotten Mplayer to work under Firefox, which means that I can watch .mov's that way. I don't really know what I did to get Mplayer working correctly, however. :(

• Multiple clocks for my Gnome taskbar

  I'm definitely in the pro-Gnome camp. (Sorry, Linus.) I like the smoothness of the design, the consistency and the ease of modification, and I definitely prefer a nice pretty GUI. Changing something in KDE means fiddling around with a hundred different settings. Doing the same thing in Gnome is often far, far easier. But Gnome isn't capable of as much, so it's a tradeoff. Case in point: it seems impossible to have multiple clocks for different timezones running on the taskbar. I like to know what time it is in Taiwan and Australia, as well as other parts of the US, so this is an annoyance. For now, I'm using a Firefox extension, FoxClocks, that does the same thing. It isn't as pretty as the Gnome taskbar clocks are, though, and of course it's only visible when Firefox is focused, so I'm still on the lookout for better options. (I've tried gDesklets, but it simply doesn't work.)

• Getting the Gimp to read my Paint Shop Pro files

  I have several big drawings that I made in PSP 7.0 that I'd really like to be able to get working in the Gimp. My Win2000 installation is screwed up on this computer, and I'd really rather not have to reinstall it just to get Paint Shop Pro working. The Gimp sort of reads my .psp files; it seems to recognize the layers, but doesn't actually read in any data. At least, it never actually displays the pictures. I recently figured out that my Wacom Intuos tablet is truly plug-n-play under Mandrake -- I just plugged it into the USB port and it worked instantly -- so now I'm hankering to work on these images again. If I could avoid Windows entirely, that would be really nice.

  Update, June 2005: I finally figured out the way to do this. I'm sure it was obvious to anyone with half a brain, but not to me. The thing to do is, save those Paint Shop Pro files as Photoshop (.psd) files. I think PSP does a pretty good job of creating them, and the Gimp opens them with no problem.

• Getting my Wacom Graphire tablet to work

  This project took forever. I thought I'd never be able to get it working, so I didn't even bother to list it here as a project. I just got it to work, however!

  I looked over the Linux Wacom Project a lot. And there's also Wacom input drivers for XFree86. However, none of it ever really made sense. For example, those pages seemed to indicate that I'd actually have to mess around with my kernel to get my Wacom tablet working. That seemed insane, especially since I'd seen mention on the Web that Mandrake 10.1 (which I am using as of June 2005) should work out of the, um, DVD case with Graphires.

  One page that helped me a lot in figuring this gnarly problem out was Will Henney's Wacom Tablet: Re-install of drivers after upgrade to FC3. A lot of what he said there applied to my situation.

  Part of the deal was finding an RPM of the Wacom drivers and stuff. The one I'm currently using is 6.6.1, I think. It seems to be working fine.

  A real trick, one that I didn't find during my confused looks through the Linux Wacom Project, was how to know which /dev/input/event-thingy my tablet was operating on. I eventuall y found a hint on the net. Become root in a terminal and then type cat /dev/input/event0, then drag the stylus around on the tablet. If the tablet is plugged in correctly, and if it's on event0, you should see a bunch of data cascade down the screen every time you move the stylus. If not, nothing will happen. If nothing happens, close the terminal and try cat /dev/input/event1, then cat /dev/input/event2, etc. until you find a cat that produces data when you move the stylus. When you find which event the stylus is on, you know how to modify your XFree86. (XFree86 is, by the way, located at /usr/X11/ on my system, and, I suspect, on all Mandriva 2006 systems.)

  Modifying your XFree86 file can fill you with apprehension, but it's not that bad. Just make sure to save a backup (XFree86_backup or whatever) before you start messing around with it. Here's what the main Wacom section of my XFree86 file currently looks like:

  Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier "Eraser1"
      Driver "wacom"
      Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
      Option "Type" "eraser"
      Option "Mode" "Absolute"
      Option "USB" "on"
  EndSection
  
  Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier "Cursor1"
      Driver "wacom"
      Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
      Option "Type" "cursor"
      Option "Mode" "Absolute"
      Option "USB" "on"
  EndSection
  
  Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier "Stylus1"
      Driver "wacom"
      Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
      Option "Type" "stylus"
      Option "Mode" "Absolute"
      Option "USB" "on"
  EndSection
  

  And here's the end of the file, the Server Layout section:

  Section "ServerLayout"
      Identifier "layout1"
      InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
      InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
      InputDevice "Eraser1" "AlwaysCore"
      InputDevice "Cursor1" "AlwaysCore"
      InputDevice "Stylus1" "AlwaysCore"
      Screen "screen1"
  EndSection
  

  I'm still not entirely sure how I did it, but somehow I prevailed.

  Update, November 2006: I recently moved to Ubuntu. Getting a Wacom installed under Ubuntu is dead easy, at least compared with Mandriva. One of many reasons I prefer Ubuntu, at least so far.

• Perfect astronomy program

  I've recently gotten into astronomy. (Well, I've always been into astronomy, but I haven't always owned a telescope...) Naturally, I went looking for the various astronomy programs that are available for Linux.

  I mainly want something that will give me useful, black-on-white skymaps to use at night. Ideally, the program should let me choose the magnitude of stars that the skychart shows, so that, as I get better at recognizing stars, I can ramp up the information level. So, here are the apps I've looked at:

  • My new favorite is Cartes du Ciel (aka Skychart). It's the freeware port of a for-profit program, apparently. It's quite clearly the best of the freeware programs, it's just hard to find. It has printing problems, but the databases it comes with and its general features are much better than the other programs I've tried.

  • The ideal choice was once pretty clear: Xephem outputs quite readable starcharts and allows me to set how much different magnitudes show up. The interface is a little clunky, though, and the sky views don't show the names of constellations (a necessity for a newbie like me).

  • Kstars is a near runner-up. Its interface is a lot more streamlined than Xephem's, it includes way more objects than Xephem does, and it apparently allows direct control of the telescope through the computer. However, when it prints to my printer, I end up with a horribly distorted and useless image, pretty much nothing like what I saw on the screen. KStars does allow saving of the image, which makes it like it should be, but I don't like having to add the extra step of then opening it in the GIMP or Firefox or whatever to actually print. KStars also doesn't allow for varied levels of magnitude; it's all there, all the time.

  • Stellarium is by far the prettiest of the bunch. It shows the sky in real-time, with lots of pretty gradients, actual images for major features (like M31, the Andromeda galaxy), relatively interesting information about each object (distance in LY, Hipparcos numbers, etc.) and more. But it doesn't appear able to print, and it's a little bit of a resource hog and only runs in fullscreen mode.

  • Celestia isn't really an astronomy program. It's more of a star travel program. It allows virtual travel around the universe, allowing you to look at

  • StarPlot is a really cool looking 3D star-viewer, but I've never been able to get it to compile on my system.

    Update, August 2006: I finally got it to compile. I don't remember what I did differently, besides running it from within $HOME instead of in a system-wide file.

    The next problem was getting the data packages to compile. The problem, as of the build I used, was that starpkg includes references in itself to itself, but these are a relative location rather than an absolute one. Changing all mentions of starpkg to /home/name/location/starpkg solved this. (The creator said he planned to change this in future builds.)

    See below for an icon I designed for Starplot.

• Get SCIM to stop dumping core

  SCIM is a great input system for Chinese (and, it seems, many other languages as well). However, it doesn't play very nicely with many other apps. Firefox in particular simply won't run with SCIM as my default input system. I therefore have to go into every update of Firefox and change the shell script by adding the following to the beginning of the file:

  scim -f x11 -c simple -ns socket -d
  export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
  export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
  export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim 

  This allows programs like Firefox, Xara LX, etc. to run. However, it also makes them dump core every time I start them up. I end up with hordes of little core dumps all over my desktop and wherever else they feel like plopping down. This is highly annoying, and I want to fix it, but I don't yet know how to. I'm pretty certain it has something to do with the export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim line, but I don't know specifically what to fix about it.

  Update, November 2006: Since moving to Ubuntu, I haven't had this problem at all. Gotta love that.

• Getting my mouse to work perfectly

  I bought a Logitech MX610 laser mouse a while ago when my previous mouse started conking out on me. This one has all kinds of cool buttons, some of which I've actually gotten to work (the volume control buttons now actually control the Gnome system volume, thanks to Gconf). It certainly tracks much better than optical mice.

  However, the mouse behavior is still pretty erratic. It sometimes double-clicks when I single-click, opening and closing a menu immediately or accidentally opening a file that I just wanted to move. It's also very slow to notice that it's being moved, sometimes causing a second-long delay where I have to move it all around before the system finally starts moving the cursor appropriately. The tracking speed is also sometimes erratic. This is extremely annoying. I found mentions on the Net that it might be something about the legacy mode, so I went into BIOS and turned off the legacy mode. This made the random-clicking problem mostly go away, but all the other problems remain.

• Getting Opera to work

  I've used Firefox since before it was Firefox. I don't actually remember which of its names it had when I started using it. But I'm not all that loyal, especially since 2.0 looks likely to stop using my system (Gnome) theme.

  Why do that? What's the point of making Firefox ignore the theme that I specifically chose for the whole system? It seems like needless annoyance to me. And Firefox still hogs memory in an insanely bad way.

  So I'm ready and willing to use Opera. But it has big problems, too: it uses Qt instead of GTK, so my Gnome themes don't work; and it also has chosen some ridiculous font as the base one, even though I've set every font I can to something that's actually readable. Apparently, there's some hugely involved way of getting Opera to not choose stupid fonts, but why bother? And Opera imports all my Firefox bookmarks -- and there are a lot of them -- in alphabetical order, instead of the order I want them in. What's the point of that?

  So for now, I'm still using Firefox. Hopefully there won't be any huge security issues with older versions of Firefox discovered after the 2.0 release, because I have no intention of "upgrading" to a version that doesn't use any less memory and in fact makes my system themes unusable.

• Installing various other apps

  There is a whole raft of apps I'm unable to install, due mainly to dependency hell:

  • The Democracy player. This looks like a really cool alternative to TV, but it falls victim to a very long list of dependencies.

    Update, November 2006: Since installing Ubuntu, I've gotten Democracy working quite well. (Okay, there are problems with it -- it hogs the CPU and occasionally locks up -- but those are problems with Democracy, not the distro.)

  • The Scribes editor. It looks like a Gnome version of Quanta, and I suspect it'll run better (being as I use Gnome) and have better language support.

  • Wings3D. A very nifty subdivision modeler.

  • Open Clipart Library. I get unpacking errors on this.

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Other Linux things

Here are some other things that are interesting or amusing and Linux-related:

• Slashdot.

  One of the most popular Linux-related sites around. New kernels & software developments for Linux are posted there all the time.

• Freshmeat.

  A constantly-updated index of open source software and other things. Freshmeat has pretty good indexes -- searching on "games," for example, will give a pretty good list of games available.

• Sourceforge.

  Sourceforge is the ocean to Freshmeat's river; it is full of hordes and hordes and hordes of open source software projects. Some of them are actually active, too. Lots of them are great, but the site design leaves a little to be desired -- information overload. I usually find what I want on Freshmeat, then go to Sourceforge (where the project is inevitably hosted).

• The Linux Game Tome.

  An excellent index of games available for Linux, with ratings, links, screenshots, etc.

• Everyone looks spiffy with a Tux.

  A funny little Flash animation illustrating Linux users' plans for world dominion. I like how the genetically engineered cybergoats look like K-9. And I actually understood most of the buzzwords in it.

• Some icons by me.

  I've made a few icons for my Linux apps. Here they are:

  

  An icon for weiqi/go games.

  

  An icon for Pente.

  

  An icon for Firestarter, the firewall app I use. The biohazard background is by Jakub 'jimmac' Steiner.

  

  Another icon for Firestarter.

  

  An icon for Firefox. Cute but smart.

  

  Another version of the same icon. The world in the background makes it a bit more cheery and colorful.

  

  Yet another version of the same icon. More shadows than the one above.

  

  I recently got SETI@home working again on my system. Linux doesn't seem to have many SETI@home icons, so I made some.

  

  Here's another one. You can't see it here, but it has a shadow behind the main icon.

  

  And another. This one looks good against a darker desktop background.

  

  An icon for anticapslock measures. I use this as an icon for the script xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock", which turns off that annoying capslock key.

  

  Another anticapslock icon. This one more closely approximates a keyboard key.

  

  A general icon for astronomy programs.

  

  A general oscilloscope-type image. I use it for audio editing programs.

  

  An icon for the program Starplot.

  

  A generic icon for pinball games or anything that involves a steely sphere of some sort.

  These icons are free for non-profit downloading and redistribution as long as you acknowledge my authorship and give a link back to this site.

• A screenshot of my desktop.

  I don't know why everyone puts these up on their websites, but here is one for you to check out. No, wait, I do know why everyone puts these up. It's because getting everything running and customizing your own desktop is a stressful but rewarding process, and people who've gone through it are justifiably proud. Oh, and of course, pure vanity.

  And here's a more recent one. And an even more recent one.

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This page (http://www.jiawen.net/ linuxbits.html) designed and ©2000-2006 by Rachel Kronick. All rights reserved. Last updated November 26, 2006.