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I think the problem here is not really directly related to Mrxvt not supporting unicode since MC does not fully support Unicode either. The problem I think is that Debian Etch (4.0) is shipped with Unicode support enabled by default. In fact locale shows that encoding is by default set to UTF-8. Now, to get a better display of MC, we need to make some minor adjustments. First, open terminal, like xterm or Eterm, then change to root user and do the following: #: dpkg-reconfigure --force locales Select locales you need to be installed/configured in your system. Then select, for example, en_US.ISO-8859-15. This will configure your system to use ISO-8859-15 encoding by default. Restart computer and off you go. ~ts

STAF is a software test automation framework, see this link for more information. When installing the software remotely without manual intervention, silent install is must have feature. The package was actually created using InstallShield Multiplatform. In fact silent installation is documented in the STAF User's Guide. But unfortunately it does not mention all the options, just the most frequently used ones. What I am going to do here is to document how to get those options and a sample command to install STAF with "Start STAF on user login" and "Place Icons on the Quick Start Menu" not included during installation. To get the command line options, you need to read the InstallShield .uip file that defines all those options. For STAF this can be found from this link . To get the command line option for "Start STAF on user login" and "Place Icons on the Quick Start Menu" was not really that challenging because the developers were using v

When removing hardware devices in Windows, the drivers are left in the system just in case you need to install the device again. But this can be problematic with network cards specially when it is configured statically. To remove this hidden network card, do the following: c:\> set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 c:\> DEVMGMT.MSC Then in the Device Manager window, do View->Show Hidden Devices. Delete network cards that are not present in the system as necessary. See this link for more information and other methods. ~ts

I had my machine installed with Debian Etch minimal install. Looks like by default alsa-base et al are not installed by default. Anyway, to get sound working on this machine and distribution, just do: ~: su #: apt-get install alsa-base alsa-utils and off you go. Also visit the following links for more information http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=21180 http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Sound_in_Debian_GNU/Linux ~ts

What I mean with system font here is the font that is being used in the menu bar.. etc. That would include anything that is shown in the About window, task bar, tab bar. For this exercise we will use terminus. This may not be the best font for menus as this is a fixed width font i think. Anyway, we need to first install the font first. ~: su #: apt-get install terminus #: exit ~: cd ~/.mozilla/firefox Here you need to determine what is the first part of *.defualt. Once you have the name then do change into that directory, example: ~: cd xpwzepdt.default Now make a copy of userChrome-example.css ~: cp userChrome-example.css userChrome.css Do edit the file, then make the following changes # ~: nano -w userChrome.css # this one will set the default system Iceweasel font to terminus * { font-family: terminus !important; font-size: 8pt !important; } Enjoy! ~ts

My home network is quite non-standard. I have an AirLink 101 wireless router which act as a DHCP server as well. I haven't found a way to configure this device so that the data returned by the DHCP server to the clients will include my real gateway machine's address. I think this is possible with this device but since the manual is so sparce and I haven't encountered information online that shows me how to do this so I change the gateway address instead on the clients. For machines with Debian Etch installed, this can be configured in /etc/network/interfaces. See below for my configuration: #: nano -w /etc/network/interfaces # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp gateway 192.168.1.10 up route del default up route add default gw 192.1

Freemind is a mind mapping application. Latest version can be found in http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page , it was at version 0.9.0 beta 14 when I wrote this document. I really like this application and the design is quite intuitive. Since this program is still in beta there are rough around the edges. Like say setting the keyboard shortcut for removing the last icon for a node is not working. What I am going to do here is to document how to get this one functionality working. By default (at least for 0.9.0 beta 14) "Remove Last Icon" is assigned to "BACK_SPACE" key. But for some reason it is not working. Here are the steps on getting this guy working: 1.) Extract a copy of mindmap_menus.xml. For zip installation, this can be found in <Extracted_Dir>/lib/freemind.jar. I used 7-zip to extract the file. Tough 7-zip's website didn't mention that it supports jar files it is capable of handling the file type successfully. Jar is p