Blog & White

In linux/Xorg, use inet(dtk2000) in xorg.conf's XkbLayout option (in addition to whatever basic layout you are already using) to be able to use the navigation and multimedia keys in the Typematrix EZReach 2030 USB keyboard. Only the eject key is not working. After that, it's up to the applications or window manager to make use of them, this config option only associates X11 symbols to the keys. I hadn't found this information anywhere on the web, I hope it will be useful to someone.

Zalama.net tracks where, around Muurame, lightning has struck.

Sirop de menthe verte et jus d'orange, c'est super bon. Maintenant que j'y pense, Ricola faisait des bonbons orange-menthol quand j'étais jeune. Je n'ai donc rien inventé, en fait.

3 ans de blog, 682 messages, 188 commentaires (tant que ça ?) et 180 000 spams.

Firefox didn't allow me to print by default. Printing to a file was the only proposed option. The culprit here is not even Firefox but GTK, which needs to be told that there is life beyond printing to a file. I put to my $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 file the following line: gtk-print-backends="pdf,cups,lpr,file", and I could finally print to lpr.

Debian Lenny's default kernel is tickless, meaning that there is no periodic tick anymore. As a result, it seems that some applications that use periodically short sleeps (as in while(1) { // do possibly something; usleep(250); }) are scheduled far too often and the CPU is running more than in should while the system is seemingly idle. Passing the option nohz=off to the kernel seems to have fixed that problem.

I didn't need to say bye bye to Helvetica after all. The least bad compromise seems to be using the bitmap Helvetica font for GUI anyway, and set Firefox to use DejaVu fonts without allowing web sites to decide what font to use (I don't have anything besides DejaVu anyway, so I won't miss anything by doing so).

I have used Helvetica as the sole font in WindowMaker for the past 12 years (AFAICR). I recently upgraded to Debian Lenny and switched from Mozilla 1.7 to Firefox 3.5 (at last!) I managed to setup my system to use the Helvetica bitmap font, which looks much nicer than Nimbus Sans (the Type 1 equivalent) in WindoMaker, and I was happy. But I discovered that Firefox now (AFAICT) prints Helvetica text using the Helvetica bitmap font, which produces very ugly documents. Mozilla was somehow smart enough to use vector fonts for that, but not Firefox. Helvetica seems to be something of the past :(

So I switched to DejaVu fonts for WindowMaker and Nimbus for GTK applications and Firefox. It's so sad.