There’s a simple trick, run this from the console as an admin (sudo if you please):

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

When it asks what kind of keyboard you have, hit “m” to select Macbook then hit enter. Keep hitting enter (or letter keys to select options, multiple taps on the same letter will scroll) and you’ll get your way through.

Keys should work after that

last -i | grep user | head -n 5

Last shows the last (lots) of users that logged in, the -i shows IP’s, then you use grep to filter by the word “user” and use head show the top five. Yay, all done.

Options -Indexes

This is a good way of doing this, since it then tells the web browser “You’re not allowed in here” rather than having to create blank files to hide your directories

I figured that I’d been playing around too much so uninstalling everything to do with media playing then reinstalling it might be the go, and I was right

If you’re having problems and nothing really works, try this…  either su to root or use sudo in front of this command to run it as root:

 apt-get remove totem libdvdcss2 libdvdread3

Or just go into Synaptic and remove Totem, libdvdcss and libdvdread. Then go into Quickstart again and install the DVD software. You should be good to go

If you do have any problems, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can work out that I’ve left out – I removed a few things but I think those three packages are the main problem causing ones.

Here’s the solution if you don’t like clicking…

Try adding this to your /etc/modprobe.d/options (or alsa-base) file:

options snd-hda-intel model=XXX

Replace XXX with one of the quoted values in the list below (remove the quotes)

“3stack” – 3-jack
“3stack-dig” – 3-jack with SPDIF I/O
“6stack-dig” – 6-jack with SPDIF I/O
“auto” – auto-config reading BIOS (default)

I used the “3stack” option for my Toshiba Satellite laptop with Intel hda audio and it worked perfectly.

1. Press Ctrl+P to go to Preferences
2. Then select Sounds tab
3. In the sound method section, select “Command”
4. Type “aplay -q %s” (without the quotes) as the command.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
You have been connected to Brian J.

• Brian J: Hello, how may I help you?
• Customer: Hi, I was just wondering what the different backup solutions offered with the dedicated servers actually were
• Customer: you list network backup or discsync, what’s the difference?
• Brian J: Disksync is automated and much more user friendly.
• Brian J: You can set it up to automatically run as frequent as you prefer.
• Brian J: NAS is space in a seperate storage array you would have to copy and send the data to when you would like to save.
• Customer: so the network backup is nas space allocated to us, disksync uses an automated agent?
• Brian J: Correct
• Customer: and what does disksync require on the server, a username/password setup on ftp or ssh?
• Brian J: Neither its a GUI agent installed on the user console
• Customer: I’m a little lost
• Brian J: Using a simple GUI interface, you can manage all aspects of your backup and recovery including data retention periods, backup schedules, and data restoration.
• Customer: yes, but how does it access the server assuming I’m going to change firewall rules and services running on the server I intend to setup?
• Customer: (I’m looking at a bare bsd/centos box)
• Brian J: The firewall rules would have no effect on Discsync
• Customer: how does it access the server?
• Customer: assuming it doesn’t traverse the network (which you seem to be implying by saying the firewall rules will not effect it)
• Brian J: Through the agent console installed on the box
• Customer: never mind, found the information
• Customer: you’re incorrect by the way – firewall rules would actually cause problems if they weren’t correct
• Customer: refer to your company’s faq on http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=83882
• Customer: goodbye.

Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

I was at home, and Dad called me for my opinion on one (he was looking for a new one as well) and I rendered it, saying that it was a damn good buy. I ended up going and having a look, so we bought two.

It’s an Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz, with a 120Gb SATA HDD, 1gb Ram, Nvidia 7300 Go graphics, 15″ widescreen (1280×800) and all the other usual things (including bluetooth) So far I’ve played EVE Online with it, and done a bunch of other things and it seems to be a quite capable machine, especially since it was only $2500 including a 3 year warranty

The next test is to install linux on it – I’m not sure which distro I’m going to use – it’ll either be gentoo or ubuntu. I’ve been using ubuntu on my desktop for a while, and it “just works” … except for sound. Gentoo might get put on in that case.

Here’s some photos of the laptop on its release.

This was a seperate page on the site, now it’s just a blog post. Here it is:

Ok, so there’s a bit of a dearth of real information on real topics on the internet, and I try to fix that where I can, here’s how to get (at the moment anyway) dual monitors working in Ubuntu Dapper on an Nvidia video card.

Getting access to the packages
Ubuntu plays nice as far as non-open-source programs and so forth goes, so you’re going to have to activate the Multiverse and Universe repositories in Synaptic.

Becoming god (or escalating your user to root for a while)
I’m a console weenie, and that’s how to get this working, so to save messing around do this:

sudo passwd

Then enter your password, then follow the prompts to change the root password so you can actually su to root and do things easily. Yes, it’ll let you actually log in as root, yes this makes your PC less secure if you’re running without a firewall and an easily guessed password, no, I don’t care about you if you can’t secure your network. Change to the root login:

su

Put in your password and now you’re effectively logged in as root. Don’t do stupid things like deleting all your files – if you do, that’s your own fault.

Install the nvidia-glx package and its dependencies – here’s the commands via the console:

apt-get update
apt-get install nvidia-glx

The first command updates your apt package list, and the second one installs the files. Read what’s on the screen, make sure it’s going to install things and then say yes when it asks you to.

Setting up xorg.conf
First, make a backup – you want to be able to get back to where you were before you broke something if you did.

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.mybackup

This’ll (if you didn’t guess) make a backup to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.mybackup.

In linux ATI has a driver that works, kinda. Nvidia‘s got a great driver, but a sucky config program, so this is going to take a little bit of messing around. What we’re going to have to do is trick it a little. This might be the hard way to do it, but it’s how I got it working, so meh. Do this:

rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
nvidia-xconfig –twinview

That’ll delete the original file, then you’re running the nvidia config program and telling it to setup your xorg.conf file with twinview enabled. It should also set it up right to use the proprietry nvidia module instead of open source one.

After that, you’ll have to setup multiple screens – this was shamelessly stolen from Nvidia’s Howto on setting up multiple screens which is not exactly what we want to do.

Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf for editing – I use VIM, but you can use gedit by going (from your logged-in-as-root console):

gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Make sure to edit this line in the “Module” section to disable the glx module loading, because the nvidia driver seems to have it built in or something:

Original:

Load “glx”

Edited:

# Load “glx”

Delete the section that starts with Section “Device” and then create two new Device sections, each listing the BusID of the graphics card to be shared and listing the driver as “nvidia”, and assign each a separate screen:

Section “Device”
Identifier “nvidia0″
Driver “nvidia”
BusID “PCI:5:0:0″
Screen 0
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “nvidia1″
Driver “nvidia”
BusId “PCI:5:0:0″
Screen 1
EndSection

To find the right BusID, you’ll need to run the command:

lspci

Look for something with Nvidia VGA in it, and on the left will be something like “00:00:05″ which would mean you’d use the same as above.

Then, create two Screen sections, each using one of the Device sections:

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “nvidia0″
Monitor “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth 24
Subsection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1024×768″
EndSubsection
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen1″
Device “nvidia1″
Monitor “Monitor1″
DefaultDepth 24
Subsection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1024×768″
EndSubsection
EndSection

This’ll setup a pair of monitors running 1024×768 at 24bit colour depth. If you want different resolutions or depths, just change it – remember that it won’t work too well if you’re running two different resolutions – I don’t know if it’ll work at all.

Since you’re running a second monitor you’ll need to add another monitor definition to the file, so add this somewhere:

Section “Monitor”
HorizSync 60-110
Identifier “Monitor1″
Option “DPMS”
VendorName “Monitor2″
VertRefresh 65.0-85.0
EndSection

That’s the right setup for an average 17″ CRT that’ll do 1024×768@85hz. I couldn’t find a page that’ll show you the right way to do any other setup, but it’s pretty easy to work out.

Next, edit the ServerLayout section to use and position both Screen sections. Just add these lines (you may need to change “leftOf” to “rightOf” or something like that depending on how you have your monitors setup – or just swap the cables over :

Screen 0 “Screen0″
Screen 1 “Screen1″ leftOf “Screen0″

Run this again:

nvidia-xconfig –twinview

I don’t know why, but it fixed it for me. Restarting your pc (type “reboot” at the console for the easy way) should get you to a graphical desktop on Ubuntu spanned across two screens, with the ability to run 3D applications (they’ll probably span to 2048×768, but that’s half the fun) and maximise normal applications to a single screen only – something that xinerama and plan twinview setups seem to break.

I’m pretty sure that should all work for you, I’ll test it on a spare machine in the next little while – suggestions/corrections? Email me. ]]> http://www.yaleman.org/2006/06/11/nvidia-dual-monitors-on-ubuntu-dapper/feed/ 0 http://www.yaleman.org/2006/06/11/new-pc-bits-woes-wonder/ http://www.yaleman.org/2006/06/11/new-pc-bits-woes-wonder/#comments Sat, 10 Jun 2006 16:47:16 +0000 James http://www.ricetek.net/2006/06/11/new-pc-bits-woes-wonder/ I’m really an AMD fan at heart – who wouldn’t be – they are cheap, fast and these days they are stable as well. Intel‘s been behind in most desktop chip related matters since they released the Pentium 4, with its long pipeline and surface-of-the-sun temperatures.

I’ve been using a P4 based system as my linux desktop because in 2004 when I set it up, the support for NForce2 chipset related gubbins wasn’t that good, and there wasn’t a high performance/quality motherboard with anything else for AMD processors. It was an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe WiFi Edition, with a couple of SATA controllers, onboard raid, fast chip and four memory slots – a great board all round. The 2.8Ghz “C” chip that was in it was a good speed for the money, and it’d worked well as my desktop workhorse since I bought it, but lately I’d been feeling the need for speed.

Bob is one of those crazy overclocking types that I used to be before I broke too many things and got bored with an unstable computer, and he’d recently finished upgrading his PC on the cheap. It only cost him about $300, and that included a Sempron 2800+, new motherboard and a nice shiny X1600 Pro – damn good for the money.

I wanted to upgrade, seeing his machine be so fast and hearing that Nvidia video cards actually supported 3D while running dual monitors on linux (something ATI has yet to get working). MSY were still selling the Foxconn NF4K8AB-RS for $45, the same board that Bob had bought a few weeks ago and found to be pretty good for the money. As far as cheap video cards for PCI-E go, the 6200TC series seemed to be the way to go, and I bought the MSI NX6200TC-TD256ELF for $55 (Nvidia 6200 Turbo Cache Low Profile etc). Bob wanted a Sempron 3400+ and I didn’t need that much more speed, so I bought his Sempron 2800, knowing that he’d tested it to do at least 2.4Ghz (1.6Ghz stock speed) if I wanted to overclock it.

It was an easy install as usual for anything computer-related with me, and was nice that I didn’t even have to shift the motherboard standoffs. I re-used the Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu that I had from my P4 (yay for multi-fit coolers) and I was away. Well, to start with.

The Foxconn’s a cheap board, we’ve established this. Cheap boards with three ram slots tend to have the third one as a joke, and this was no exception. So far I haven’t been able to get it to boot with three RAM sticks in it – which sucks – having another half gigabyte of ram is always nice with what I do. So, with a BIOS reset and a gig of ram, I was away.

Next hurdle, video drivers. I hadn’t bothered to change the config in xorg.conf on my Ubuntu Dapper install, so of course that broke, going from an ATI video card to an Nvidia will do that. A bit of research and messing around later I’d found how to tell dapper to let me nuke the ATI drivers and get the NVidia ones installed (there’s some weirdness in how it backs up some files as part of the ATI driver package being installed, not letting them be restored/removed when you got to remove them.)

Eventually I got back into graphical, with one monitor working, which was weird – every other dual-output graphics card I’d ever seen and used would automatically just clone the picture to the second one when you didn’t have monitor spanning setup. Two hours of swearing and searching the net later, I found a random post on one of those “user review” sites with someone complaining about some 6200 cards not supporting dual-monitor setups. I’d specifically asked in the store about dual monitors being supported by the card, so technically I was covered by the Fair Trading act if they gave me any problems, but it was quite easy to go and buy a more expensive card (not surprising) and I ended up with the Forsa 6600 256mb for the princely sum of $112. Huzzah.

A bit more messing around and I’d gotten dual monitors working. Then a bit more swearing and I actually got dual monitors working PROPERLY. Hooray for shitty documentation on the internet. My next post will be about getting dual monitors working, since I couldn’t find a clear howto that worked how I wanted it to (two monitors, 3d, the ability to shift windows between monitors and be able to hit maximise and not take up both screens)

Once that was all working we overclocked it a little, and now it’s sitting stable (so far) on 2.0ghz at just slightly above stock voltage. With the Zalman cooler on it it’s running at a low temperature and it’s basically silent. All for a total cost of under $250, most of which I should get back by selling the P4P800 and the 2.8C Pentium 4 on eBay!

Install the XMMS libraries lib-mad from the external sources…
From a console:

rpm -i mad-0.15.1B-32.1.i586.rpm
rpm -i xmms-lib-1.2.10-103.pm.1.i586.rpm

Or browse to where you downloaded them and use the package manager from your desktop environment. KDE allows you to right click on the .rpm file and open an install program.

Install the XMMS program files off the SUSE 10.1 Install media…

I installed from the DVD media, so it was on (when it was mounted in KDE) /media/SU1010_001/suse/i586

Via console:

rpm -i xmms-1.2.10-103.i586.rpm

Or find it via GNOME/KDE etc and install that one as above.

Once those three packages are installed, you should be able to listen to MP3′s on your SUSE 10.1 install – if something doesn’t work, please email me and I’ll post a corrected version. (remember to remove the .nospam from the end of the email address)

Just to avoid a little confusion I’ll point this out right now – I’ll write this more like a mini-journal – writing things as they happen, rather than a proper article where all the findings are taken into account throughout the whole post.

Finalising the install it detected all my hardware successfully – including the built-in Toshiba softmodem and the Xircom 10mbit network card/modem combo thingy – which was nice to see. I got to the final part of the installer and it went to a black screen – it had been turning off the monitor after a set amount of time – and locked. Powering it on and off again got me to a graphical desktop and a working machine – huzzah.

It takes a little longer to start up than the previous windows install – something I’m used to with linux machines in general. The only time I’ve seen a faster startup was with a seriously stripped down setup running debian not long after the 2.6 kernel series was released. It seems that a lot of the automagical things that have been built into the linux startup in the past two or three years seriously slow down the process – something that I’m going to investigate optimising in the future – there has to be better ways to do things like this.

So far so good, it’s nothing special as far as speed is concerned, but KDE seems to be spritely to respond to opening windows and so forth – something that I was worried about considering the system’s specs. The K menu (like the windows start menu) takes a second or two to load – KDE loads the config each time you load the menu, so edits to the menu actually update on the fly, rather than GNOME‘s retarded need to restart the menu before updates take effect.

So, it’s time to work through the settings and kill off anything that’s going to slow down my machine. Anti-aliased fonts are really nice, but I think I’m going to turn that off – I can deal with a little “ugly” in the interests in a bit more “fast”. Icon animations are nice if you’re into the Fisher-Price school of interface design, another thing I don’t need when the cpu’s playing catch-up as it is. Goddamn this screen blanking thing is annoying – it doesn’t take into account mouse movements, needing a keypress before it realises that I’m sitting here trying to do something. The next item in KDE configurator was screensaver, disabling its four minute timeout will hopefully fix this. Nope, that wasn’t it – checking out the available themes and so forth, it’s gone blank again. Bah.

Desktop -> Window Behaviour -> Advanced gave me another hopeful speed boost – the ability to turn off animation during “shading” of a window – when you’re basically resizing it to just the titlebar. The “Moving” tab allowed me to turn off animated minimise/restore and also the KDE equivalent of “don’t show window contents on resize/move.”

Finally I’ve found the option that actually lets me delete things instead of sending them to the trash can in KDE – it’s hidden in KDE Components -> File Manager -> Behaviour. Tick the box that says “Show ‘Delete’ context mnu entries which bypass the trashcan” and all will be well in the world again. The screen’s turned off again, I hope this isn’t going to be an ongoing thing…

Huzzah, another option to turn off display power management (there’s one in the KPowersave preferences that didn’t seem to do anything) under Peripherals -> Display -> Power Control. Dang, as soon as I hit apply to disable standby/suspend/power off after times, it went blank again – hopefully it was just a final “seeya” to that. Nope, did it again after looking at a few other things. Maybe turning off power management will fix it? Nope, there it goes again. Why are there three (so far) places to turn on and off display power management, but none of them seem to work? Gah.

I can’t seem to find anything on the internet about how to fix this, so it’s probably one of those “have to research for six months, then find the solution in a hidden hack or update” kind of things.

There’s a few basic games installed, which is nice – freeciv, frozen bubble and a couple of others – you have to have SOME sort of entertainment on your computer, and these are well-developed games from the OSS community.

People are turning up at work so I need to finish this off… and I’ve run out of things to try at the moment anyway – the last thing I have to say is that so far, it’s no worse than Windows 2000 to use, and there’s a bunch more things that can be done with it, so I’m happy

As I tend to have a load of windows open at the one time, and I like to see them all at once having dual monitors is a must for me. The ATI 9600 card I have supports this, being dual head, and I’d had it running (kinda) on Gentoo just before I went through the reinstall process.

After a few hiccups I got it working on GNOME and then got sick of problems with Xinerama not working properly (who wants to hit maximise and have the program fill BOTH monitors? hello?) and some issues with GIMP turning my half-decent PC into a complete slug when loading a bunch of photos from my Canon 350D.

I’d seen KDE 3.x, and at the time, I’d hated it – I guess it was the early revisions, but it just didn’t seem like the window manager for me. Seeing as GNOME was giving me problems, I decided to try it again – SUSE made this easy because it’s actually the default. I installed the packages, played around a bit to change the window manager and then restarted to get it going. So far I’ve had it running for three days, and it’s fast – a lot faster than GNOME, and most of my applications are GNOME based.

GIMP doesn’t give me the pc-is-a-slug programs (though it crashed and disappeared a few times today) and the machine seems a bit snappier to use all ’round. Because of my newfound love for SUSE, my good friend and housemate Robert decided to try linux again – his last attempt was in 2004 with Gentoo – a bad time to have an ATI card and no spare PC when you’re trying to learn Linux. The drivers and support SUCKED at that time, but have grown a lot better since.

He’s got a new PC since those days, but he’s still running an ATI based graphics card. His only real requirement for dumping windows finally was that he could play all his games – so he’d have to have full 3D hardware support and his windows games would have to work properly. I thought that the first one would be enough of a hiccup, but I was wrong – very wrong.

It seems in the week or so since I installed the ATI drivers, another version had come out with a graphical installer that actually worked properly. I was amazed. He’d gotten it working in an hour or two, where it’d taken me two days of messing around on the commandline – and I’m one of those nutty ex-Gentoo users that knows their way around recompiling chunks of the system to get things working!

I had to try them out – I downloaded the drivers from the ATI x86 Linux display driver page, uninstalled the current drivers and then ran the file. A little dialogue popped up, and I selected the option to install the drivers. Not long after, it told me that it was finished, and I restarted to find that everything was working fine. Colour me amazed – for the first time an ATI driver hadn’t busted X into pieces with a new driver release

Xinerama still wasn’t working properly, and Bob mentioned that when he created his x.org config file using the aticonfig utility – worlds ahead in ease-of-use compared to the old fglrxconfig – that he’d specified the resolution on his single-monitor system. I gave it a go, using “aticonfig –initial=dual-head –resolution=0,1024×768 –resolution=1,1024×768” to specify a dual head system with two 1024×768 screens. This is basically how it was already setup, so aticonfig didn’t do anything. I knew that it wasn’t actually working properly, so I set the -f flag to force it to rewrite the file, and it did.

I restarted X and it was working! Maximising a window would keep it to one monitor, something that I’d been missing ever since I’d gotten dual monitors to work on linux (a month or so ago) and had been a serious pain in the butt. The only thing that isn’t working for me is 3D DRI support, the system doesn’t have 3D hardware acceleration. It’s working on Bob’s single-monitor setup, so I hope that I can get it working too – though Xinerama might be a cause of my woes. I really want to play my win32 games on linux with the help of Cedega – I’m sure there will be a few posts about my experiments with that in the near future

1. Install XMMS
2. Download the XMMS mpg123 rpm from this page.
3. Install it:
   

   # rpm -ivh xmms-mpg123-1.2.7-13.i386.rpm
   Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
   1:xmms-mpg123 ########################################### [100%]

4. Run XMMS and enjoy!

I don’t know how to get mp3 working in a lot of the other programs, I’ll try and work that out later. There’s a short article here in DesktopLinux.com on Hacking OpenSuSE – getting mp3 and dvd support in SuSE.

emerge -e system; emerge -e system; emerge -e world; emerge -e world

That should take a while, I don’t know what step it’s up to, all I can see is “emerge: (171 of 614) app-text/ghostscript-esp-7.07.1-rc Compile” in the window title. It seems that I might be waiting a week or so for this to finish

I tend to start with an idea, get a basic vision of how it’ll work, then throw code at it until I break it, then fix it. I’ve had basic training in the previously mentioned styles, incorporating the design process, algorithm development and so forth. When I’m coding, I’ll keep this in mind, making sure the algorithm for the program works, then coding around it. When there’s something big that I want to code, I spend a bit of time working out all the different parts, writing how things work as comments, then writing the code to fulfil the requirements.

It tends to depend on how big the project is as to how each style can be used – in the best case scenario we all should use the first style, planning everything down to the smallest detail, testing everything algorithmically, then starting to code. In real life, there’s not always the time to do that, and the goals for most projects tend to change quite quickly – especially when it’s up to either the
marketing department or anyone in management.

Resources are a big part of this decision. In business, it’s about money – can you justify the money to run the company for the first stage, where you get no visible benefit from it. When you’re coding for yourself, or starting an Open Source project, there isn’t always the time available to perform the planning step, and motivation tends to run out quickly when there’s no result to show yourself and your peers.

I’d like to take part in some of the Open Source projects that are out there, but that would mean getting my programming skills up to scratch, then finding a project to join, and then starting to learn how the whole project is structured. There’s a lot of projects out there, and I don’t know where to start. I’m sure if I started working the overnight shift more often I might start to do this sort of thing, since there’s plenty of time to do it while I’m sitting here. Again, the thing that would hold me back from this would be the frustration of not having access to the Internet. There’s no way for me to access the ‘net from work, and it’s something that tends to be vital when you’re working on a project and learning a new language.

Book learning’s fine, but it’s restrictive due to the ever-changing world of computers, and learning from a book that’s even six months old means that there tends to be a lot of out of date information that just won’t work when trying to use it. What I’ve done for PHP and Python when I’ve been coding here at night has been to download the offline documentation for the language, and refer to that. It’s been helpful, but there has been many times where a search on Google would have answered my question rather quickly.

With these languages, the offline documentation is available – which is lucky. With libraries, modules and tutorials for particular sections of the language, it’s hard to find much documentation, let alone being able to download it and have it available when you’re not connected. Yes, there’s ways of stripping websites, but that’s not terribly feasible when you’re talking about small sites, let alone the PERL repository and the information contained within.

I guess I’ll just have to get my laptop in a state where I can do some programming, and start reading. Before that though, I’ll have to find a way to either run the programs I plan to use for tuning my car in Linux, or devise a way of booting both Linux and Windows on it. That’s sure to be interesting, due to the fact that it only has a six gigabyte hard drive, which is barely enough for Windows to run. The Linux tuning programs seem to be mature, so if I can successfully get them working, all will be well, and I’ll be rid of this cursed spawn of Redmond!

This page tells you to run this command:

# rm /usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4

Delete the file, and no more stupid compilation issues. Hooray! Here’s the gentoo bug report if you want more information.

Now, there’s some things that just annoy the hell out of me. Sure, text-only emails are fine, I use them nearly every time I’m sending emails because it’s a smaller message, it’s readable by any client so on and so forth. But a lot of the email lists I’m on have HTML emails, and they are useless without it because of the fact that they are either auction, forum or other “lots of visual information” sites. Sylpheed’s HTML rendering sucks. I couldn’t work out if it was a settings issue or something else doing it, but it was horrible, nasty and didn’t render anything properly. There was only one setting I could find, and that was “render HTML as text” which basically showed you the raw html.

Another problem I had with the program was the font used to display the contents of an email. I couldn’t find any settings to change it, which could have been my fault or reliant on Gnome’s default settings or something, but damn! It’s something horrible like 18 point courier new – huge and hard to read!

The “Junk Mail Filtering” option was a bit of a worry – if you turn on the “filter when it receives” option, it’ll also – from what it says in the option box – delete the messages it thinks is spam off the server. This is a worry for me, because junk mail filtering’s always a bit wrong to start with, and every time it’s wrong, it’ll be deleting something off the server that I wanted. Not nice! There’s another option in the menus allowing you to filter the junk mail out of the folder you’re currently in, but no matter what I tried, it wouldn’t actually do anything other than make the program slow and hang a bit while it was doing whatever it was doing.

Ok, so it’s fast, it’s clean, it’s relatively easy to do some things, it’d be great if I didn’t get so much porn spam, and it’s really ugly to look at. That’s what I think. I’m going back to Evolution until something else comes along.