A few months ago, I had published a praising post about Adobe Reader’s performance and feature set in comparison to Linux’ default PDF reader, Evince (Fedora Core 6 at the time of that older post). Since then, things have changed significantly for Evince in terms of performance, so I, as a user, would be unfair…
Yesterday, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version 2.5, which I liked much! For the upgrade I used a WordPress updater script I had written some months ago, which, by the way, still remains unreleased due to lack of time to prepare a stable release… Anyway, the script has worked quite well and the transition…
WordPress version 2.2 or newer allows the user to define the MySQL database character set and the collation (get familiar with these terms) inside wp-config.php. Today, after upgrading to the newest version of WordPress, I decided to also update this file and append the statement that sets the database encoding to ‘utf8‘. But, as soon…
Have you ever wondered how much time it takes a browser to load your web page across the internet or how this total webpage load time is distributed among the various HTTP requests that are sent to the web server in order to retrieve all the objects, including images, javascript, flash animations, et cetera your…
Sizing text for the screen using ems in your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) can be a problem, if you are not a web designer and have never spent any time reading about the differences between the various units that can be used to measure text size, especially pixels (px) and ems (em) which are the…
RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort of cpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use…
After many years of failure, countless hours of digging into the World Wide Web for information, numerous failed attempts due to lack of knowledge to modify the v0.6 E3 driver for USB scanners (Viceo backend) and add support for libusb, yesterday I was sent a patch, which contained the Viceo backend for SANE with libusb…
Things change rapidly in the Open-Source Software scene and, consequently, all support documentation, guides, tutorials etc need to be adapted to the new features of the software as well. I have started going through all the howto articles I’ve written about Linux during the last 3 years and perform regular document maintenance tasks, like checking…
A while ago, I had written about some problems I had encountered while trying to send notification messages with libnotify to the logged-in users’ desktops from a cronjob. Although I haven’t made any progress with that issue, I just noticed a very useful comment under that post, submitted by Aleksei. According to the tip, sudo…
The National Security Agency (NSA) of the USA has published some security configuration guides for various popular Operating Systems. Linux is covered by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 security guide, but most of the included information can be easily translated to other Linux distributions. As it is clearly stated in the guide’s disclaimer, all…