This is what I’m currently working on.

I spread a sheet of drawing paper on my actual desk and drew up a diagram. The idea is to use an existing local network cable run to route a phone line into the server room, connect it there to a splitter and a dial-up modem, and then — after the modem — bring the line back to the office over the other pairs of the same cable and plug it into the phone.

I can’t find where in GNOME you set the week to start on Monday. Right now the calendar that pops up from the panel looks like this:

In Evolution there is a setting for it, but changing it doesn’t affect the system-wide calendar.

Connected an IDC 2814BXL VR — a voice dial-up modem — to the 2003 server. Planning to set up dial-up connectivity with my subordinate sites; drew up a diagram for moving the phone into the server room and back again :) True to form, this Microserf offspring couldn’t find the drivers and didn’t recognize the ones that were there. Maybe it’ll dial just fine without drivers.

To be able to use the Win keys for hotkeys in GNOME, you need to do the following:

Gimly comments…

You can use the familiar Win+D, Win+L, and similar combinations for this purpose — found it here.

Tested on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) — dialog translations are as of the publication date.

System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Select the Layouts tab, then click the Layout Options button at the bottom.

It turned out that Mint has its own search engine baked into Firefox (wrapped around Google). You can remove it, but I couldn’t figure out where it installs from in the first place. And the search itself is pretty lame — the relevance is off, the menu at the top is awkward, and there are no settings whatsoever. Thanks to Yandex, I found an XML file, replaced the default one, and got the native familiar Google search back. By the way, lately it’s been helping me more than Yandex. I’m wondering — have the search engines changed, or am I just searching for different things now…

I’m suffering. There’s no decent dual-pane file manager in GNOME :(

Got Skype working on Mint today. My webcam with built-in microphone was recognized without any issues. What I didn’t expect was sound problems: Skype refused to either play or capture audio. Googling turned up this solution: set everything in the system sound settings to OSS (except recording — there, point it to the microphone via ALSA), and in Skype set the input directly as well, while the output — to pulse. After that everything works. No time to dig into audio subsystems right now, but there’s clearly a mess going on there.

In the desktop unlock dialog it shows the current keyboard layout. KDE doesn’t show it.

another gnome annoyance — the screensaver doesn’t dismiss with just the mouse, you have to press something on the keyboard.

There’s a theory that the piece of malware that recently sent messages on my behalf through Odnoklassniki might have come from some Firefox extension — because I had installed a couple of them from shady sites, wanting to get web sticky notes.