Midnight Commander not displaying properly in mrxvt

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 silent install with options on user login and quick menu

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 variables that pretty much describes them. Example, stafOptions.startSTAFOnLogin was used for "Start STAF on user login" and stafOptions.iconsOnQuickStartMenu was used for "Place Icons on the Quick Start Menu." With the information at hand, command should now look like below:

d:\>STAF323-setup-win32 -is:log D:\ismplog.txt -silent -W license.selection="Accept" -W setupTypes.selectedSetupTypeId="Full" -W stafOptions.updateEnvironmentVariables="System" -W stafOptions.defaultIPvVersion="IPv4 only" -W stafOptions.startSTAFOnLogin="false" -W stafOptions.iconsOnQuickStartMenu="false"

This assumes that STAF323-setup-win32.exe is in the system path or on D:\. ~ts

Error message when you try to set an IP address on a network adapter

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

Getting sound working on ECS A097 under Debian Etch

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