I've always liked XMMS as a music player program on Linux. It had enough features, but the basic interface was always simple enough to just work. Unfortunately, it is not maintained any longer, and in my latest Ubuntu upgrade to version 8.10, I found it was no longer included or supported.

The XMMS project continued with a successor, XMMS2, but it is much more than just a simple audio player. I looked at it and got lost fairly quickly. I just wanted something simple like the original XMMS.

I have Linux running on an IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop. I recently upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 4. Several things broke from upgrading, including sound.

With digital cameras so popular, the USB multi-format card readers are readily available, inexpensive, and supported on Linux.

The memory cards in the reader show up as SCSI disk devices. The digital camera manufacturers have standardized on the MSDOS FAT filesystem, so you can just read and write to the memory card through the reader as if it were a disk drive.

With LTSP, all applications run on the server. This is great for the low maintenance involved: install an application program once, and it is available immediately on all terminals.

However, some times you may want to discriminate between different terminals. For example, you may want to restrict web browsing at one terminal or another.

Many people are familiar with the "print your own greeting card" idea. You print four small page images on a single sheet of paper and fold it in half twice. You get a little greeting card with a custom cover and interior, all from one single-sided piece of paper.

I wanted to do this from a Linux application, without needing Windows or MacOS. Preferably, I could use any application to produce 4 pages, and have some magic transform it into the single page with all parts reduced and oriented properly for folding.

To print from Open Office through KPrinter, set up a printer in Open Office for it.

Run spadmin as root. On RedHat 8.0 it is at

 /usr/lib/openoffice/spadmin 

Add a new printer of type "Generic Printer". This means simple Postscript output. For the command line specify

 kprinter --stdin 

Name your printer entry "KPrinter" or something recognizable to you.

LTSP is the Linux Terminal Server Project.

It is a software package which turns old cheap low-power PCs into X Terminals whose desktop software runs on a central Linux server.

I have an old laptop being used as an LTSP X Terminal. I have found that the X server software for this laptop is buggy. Somehow Mozilla exposes a bug that locks up the terminal.