Author: Owen

problem: cpu is pegged, kwapd0 is going nuts
solution: you are out of swap / have no swap

I was having trouble getting my dvd burner to burn at maximum speed (8x) so I decided to take a chance and flash my firmware. I didn’t destroy my drive, but the upgraded firmware didn’t change anything so it’s kind of a letdown. I’m posting my method here for future reference.

Usually bios flashing is done from a floppy, but I have a modern laptop so I have no floppy. Flashing can also be done from a cdrom, but it’s a very bad idea to flash your CD drive from the CD drive!

My solution involved creating a small, ten megabyte vfat partition on my hard drive. If you don’t like the sound of that, stop reading. This is not a howto, just a set of notes. If you blow up your computer with these instructions, it’s not my fault.

1. burn a freedos cd as-is.
2. /sbin/swapoff /dev/hdaX to turn off my swap (oh yeah baby)
3. using /sbin/fdisk, delete my swap partition
4. recreate my swap partition, but leave off two of the blocks or so (about 10-16 megs)
5. create a partition of type 0xb (windows 95 32bit)
6. reboot to init new partition
7. /sbin/mkswap /dev/hdaX’ to reinit my new, slightly smaller swap
8. /sbin/swapon /dev/hdaX’
9. /sbin/mkfs.vfat /dev/hdaY to create new vfat partition
10. mount the vfat partition, copy the freedos command.com there (just in case) and all of the flashing utils / images
11. reboot with freedos cd
12. boot option 1, and then “safe mode”
13. change to c: (voila, now we are on the HD!)
14. run c:\command.com just in case (now we aren’t using the cdrom)
15. do flashing shit
16. reboot and pray you still have a cdrom

I think that’s everything.

I am trying to make the switch to firefox from galeon because of an extension I can’t live without, and I was having trouble when I set firefox as my default browser. When I opened links from other applications, they weren’t popping up in new tabs despite the preferences I set. So, I wrote a little script to correct the behavior:

firefox --remote "ping()"
if [ $? = 0 ] ; then
	firefox --remote openURL\("$1",new-tab\)
else
	firefox $1
fi

I saved this as firefox.sh, and set my default browser to firefox.sh

(Note, I am not using Tabbed Browser Extensions because it’s buggy, bloated, and holy fuck does it have too many options.)

Thanks to HAL, dbus, and the whole alphabet soup, we can execute a script when we plug in our digital camera. The default, running f-spot, doesn’t really do much good. It doesn’t accomplish what it should, namely moving all the files from the camera to our hard drive. Here’s a script I wrote that will actually do that, and it even has a progress bar! It will also create new directories if you import multiple rounds of photos, to prevent overwriting of images. Note that you need zenity in order for this to work.
Continue reading “importing photos in gnome”