Using my IPAD as an extended display using AirDisplay.

Using my IPAD as an extended display using AirDisplay.

I couldn't use AirDisplay at McDonald's or Starbuck's. The wi-fi blocked local traffic. So - this is my work-around.

In a nutshell:

• Enabled Bluetooth on both and connected my IPAD to my Mac.
• Started AirDisplay on both and connected.
• When it started up, my Mac's display shrunk to the size of my IPAD. 
• System preferences (on my Mac)
• Displays
• Arrangement - un-check 'Mirror Displays' and position the small window.

Gentoo and Citrix

This is how I set-up icaclient to access Ajubeo, which uses a Citrix ZenApp server.

First, of course, was to emerge net-misc/icaclient. The only applicable USE flag was nsplugin. I don't know if it is necessary or not, but I used it for gnash and Icedtea. So "echo "net-misc/icaclient nsplugin" >> /etc/portage/package.use/package.use

Then, of course, I added the file to package.keyword with ~amd64. Emerge then tells you that you have to go the Citrix website. The message, from elogv: │Download the client RPM file x86? ( ICAClient-12.1.0-0.i386.rpm )
│        amd64? ( ICAClient_12.1.0-0.x86_64.rpm ) from
│&http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/download/details.asp?downloadId=2323812&productId=1689163 │
and place it in /usr/portage/distfiles.

Once you do that, you can emerge again, and it will extract the rpm, putting everything into /opt/Citrix. Unfortunately, this is not the end of my story.

Choose <skip to logon>

I already had a username and password, so if you don't - you're on your own here.

Click on the link for the VCloud Portal - which is really a link for the ica client.

Firefox didn't know how to handle launch.ica. So, I chose open with, and selected "other"

Then, I navigated to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/

And selected 'wcfmgr.bin'. I also chose to "Do this automatically..."

It's still a little cranky. And when I chose to cancel the warning about being unable to connect..

And tried to connect anyway...

I was rewarded with an SSL error.

This time I tried clicked ok on the "Unable to connect.." warning and then clicked on the <Arrow> connect to selection button. Bingo

Ajubeo's login page.

Ajubeo has a great site, and I can't wait to dig into it. I just had to get past this first hurdle.

Linux Basics

I thought I knew something about Linux. All confident in my knowledge. But I didn't know Jack - still don't. But as I was reading the LPIC (Linux Professional Institute Certification) Study Guide I learned a lot. A LOT! Holy moly that book kicks ass. Now I just want to share a little of what I learned.

Gentoo On My HP Part 3

Things are going pretty well. Not well enough for me to change my GRUB2 default yet... Well, I guess I could.

But I did run across some curious problems and their solutions. The first was starting X via xdm (instead of startx). SLiM would just get stuck - not starting anything but what looked like a twm session (less terminal window). When I made xdm be the default display manager by editing /etc/conf.d/xdm and changing DISPLAYMANAGER="slim" to "xdm", the result was a loop of xdm trying to start "LXDE" but just kicking it back to the login screen.

Checking /var/log/xdm.log yields

xdm error (pid 2441): Dbus error: Unable to open session: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
xdm error (pid 2441): console-kit-daemon not running?

The solution was to add dbus to the default runlevel and restart. rc-update add dbus default They left that out of the manuals, I guess because dbus got pulled in by something else - not sure what.

As a bonus to adding dbus to the default runlevel, my MP3 player is now auto-mounted when I plug it in. (At least) Two birds with one stone!

Also, I emerged the "murrine" packages - and that cleared up most of my icon problems. x11-themes/murrine-themes and x11-themes/gtk-engines-murrine

Gentoo on my HP - Continued

I'm pretty sure that I got lucky when I configured the sound on this thing. It didn't work at first, but I'm sure that it's because I didn't have the right flags in make.conf. When I installed pysolfc, the sound worked and I'm pretty sure I did that before messing with the sound configuration in the kernel. And all I did there was to compile it as modules so I could figure out which ones I needed and which ones I didn't.

I had written a bunch of simple scripts for my Dell that I sure miss now. Some of them I rewrote - the really easy ones like the one to watch the progress of the emerge or the progress of the fetch. "tail -f /var/log/emerge.log" - easy, like I said, but I always forget where they put the emerge.log - so it comes in handy. I had a really cool one that backed up imo important files like /usr/src/linux/.config and /etc/conf.d and stuff like that and tacked the date onto it. Now I'll have to figure out how to do that again.

Gentoo on my HP2000-425NR

Well, my Dell died :-( May it rest in peace. So I bought the cheapest good machine I could find, or maybe the best cheap machine - which turned out to be a HP-2000. Memory was on sale, so I got an extra 4G.

Specs:
AMD E300 1.3 GHz processor.
6GB Ram
320GB Hard Drive
Ralink RT5390 Wireless
ATI Technologies Inc AMD Radeon HD 6310 GraphicsATI
ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)

Installing Linux has proven problematic.

A cheesy application to check for new podcasts and transfer them to my Walkman

#! /usr/bin/env python

""" Version 0.02.02
        Just a simple file manipulation tool.
        Used in this instance as a Podcast updater.
        Still stuff to do - see TODO file"""

import sys, os, time, stat, shutil
import tkFileDialog, ttk, tkMessageBox
from Tkinter import *