All these configuration settings ought to be in text files, probably XML, somewhere under ~/.gnome where I can grep for things!
Isn't this how it works now, with gconf-editor being just a gui-editor for these files?
Yes, that is exactly how it works. gconf-editor is a UI on top of gconfd (which is very useful for various things like notifying the entire system about config files changes), which writes XML files to ~/.gconf/
Mplayer is really easy to get under Ubuntu, just add the universe and multiverse repositories to your sources file, then apt-get update and apt-get install mplayer.
And it has become even simpler with Breezy Badger, open the new add/remove program application that is available in the Gnome menu, browse to the Mplayer and it will ask you if you want to add the universe or multiverse repositories and do it for you if you agree. However since you are using fvwm I do not know if this route is available to you.
Ok, I retract my rant about gconf-editor :-)
GConf also allows applications to install a schema for their configuration, which is intended to make the database more discoverable than the mess that the Windows registry is.
But the schema installation is a pain for people who build packages. And I still prefer text files because they’re much easier to synch across multiple machines…
If I understand correctly, your Subversion repositories can be “naïvely copied” if you use FSFS storage instead of BDB.
Try using "vpnc" instead of the broken Cisco client. Many universities in germany use Cisco VPN for their wireless network, and "vpnc" works with most if not all of them. (VPNC is an implementation of Ciscos Xauth non-IPsec-IPsec... a pre-shared-key approach/extension which is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, so it was rejected from the ipsec standard) If your admins won't tell you the shared secret, run ltrace on the cisco client and what for when it reads the config file. It will decrypt the secret for you.
Next time you need a partition with lots of small files, consider using ReiserFS. Reiser automatically puts multiple small files in the same block, so you don't have to worry about fiddling the block size for optimization, and can use the same partition for everything (if you want). I switched to Reiser when I was doing some GIS work with tens of thousands of tiny data files, and the difference in disk usage was astonishing. Reiser is also a journaling FS, like Ext3.
ReiserFS is inherently more fragile, though. At least these days it’s pretty mature, so reports of hair-raising blowups have become rare. But it achieves its goals by avoiding the highly and predictably structured metadata storage of more traditional filesystems, which means any error in the metadata inherently has more dire consequences for a larger portion of the filesystem than with traditional filesystems. And all that haggling with highly volatile structures eats a lot of CPU.
I’m using ext3 because waiting for fsck after a freeze or kernel panic or power outage or whatever sucks, but I don’t really like any of the journalling filesystems on offer.
"Mplayer is really easy to get under Ubuntu, just add the universe and multiverse repositories to your sources file, then apt-get update and apt-get install mplayer."
Doesn't work in 5.10 (Breezy). Pity.
it does work in breezy (5.10) just "apt-get update" and "apt-cache search mplayer" after adding universe and multiverse repositories then find the one you need probably mplayer-386 and apt-get install it.
After reading your post I found that I had the same problem with the number of workspaces not being saved across sessions on Ubuntu.
I discovered that you can fix this by running gconf-editor and setting a value for the key /apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces Mine was set to, IIRC, "" and it looks like the workspace switcher preferences isn't handling this too well.
The cause of the problem may be because I have brought my $HOME, and my Gnome config, along with me through a couple of different distros for a couple of years now. Metacity used to use the key "/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/number_of_workspaces" but it looks like this has been deprecated at some point and Gnome isn't doing something sensible with existing configs.
I've raised on the Ubuntu Bugzilla so hopefully this will get fixed.
Hope it helps!
Actually burning DVDs works fine in KUbuntu-6.06-beta2, using k3b - which uses growisofs as backend instead of cdrecord. This was a nice surprise, after reading this article ;)
vpnc --natt-mode cisco-udp your_config.conf
I could get vpnc to work instead of vpn clinet. I am using mutual group authentication with root certificate. Look at instructions here
http://www.toolsbysk.com/skforums/forum/Blah.pl?m-1247385296