Change GDM login background image on OpenSUSE 11.4

First, let me start off by saying I truly dislike Gnome, and the attitude by the Gnome devs that somehow giving people options is a bad thing.  Why is it that I cannot easily change the background image of the Gnome login screen?  Why do I have to use hacks like this one?  Why do the hacks always have to change?  Anyway, for Gnome 2.32.1 which shipped with OpenSUSE 11.4 the way to change the login background image is like this:

As root:

mv your_new_image.jpg /usr/share/pixmaps/backgrounds/gnome/background-default.jpg

Where your_new_image.jpg  is the image you want to be the new background image.

Cygwin top

If you want to use top in Cygwin, you will need to install the procps package.  I have spoken.

W3 CSS3 validation

I was fiddling around with some text-shadow stuff (which is part of the CSS3 draft) on the gdb tutorial.  When I validated the CSS at W3C, I noticed that the validator, by default, chooses CSS level 2.1 instead of CSS level 3.  You can manually select CSS3 in the drop down menu here, but I want to be able to click on the link from each of my pages.  After all, the reason I have the valid HTML5 and CSS images on every page is to have a handy way to validate each one quickly and easily.  Anyway, the fix is pretty simple, which I found in this post.  Change the link for the CSS validator to this:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer?profile=css3

The part you need to add is in red.

Getting TweetDeck (Adobe Air) to use your default browser in Gnome

This has been a bit of an issue in the past. See this lifehacker article, which was inspired by Roy Tanck's blog post.  Currently, I am using Adobe Air 2.5.1 on OpenSUSE 11.3 - i386 (Yes, I have a crappy Atom powered net book).  Every time I would open a link in TweetDeck, it would open in Firefox rather than Chromium.  To make matters worse, the place in Chromium where I could set it as the default browser, the button is grayed out, and it says "Chromium cannot determine or set the default browser."  Bummer.  But fear not, as the solution is somewhat simple.  If you have the "custom menu bar" (not the default one which ships with OpenSUSE) you can do System->System->Preferred Applications, and change the default browser there.  Alternatively, you could run "gnome-default-applications-properties" in your shell to get the dialogue box opened up.  Once I got it open, on the "Internet" tab, I dropped down the menu under "Web Browser" and selected "Custom".  Then I put in /usr/bin/Chromium.  You would obviously replace that command with the browser you want to use.  And that's it!  I didn't even have to restart TweetDeck.  It just worked from there on out.

How to change Epiphany default search from Google to DuckDuckGo (Gnome)

I have been playing around with two new toys lately:  The Epiphany web browser, and DuckDuckGo search.  I might write more on these another time, but for now I want to show you how you can change the default setting for search (in Epiphany) from Google to DuckDuckGo, by using gconf-editor in Gnome:

Fire up a shell, and enter:

gconf-editor

A dialogue box will pop up.  Click on apps -> epiphany -> general

You will see a list of things on the right.  Scroll down until you see 'url_search'.  Click that, then right click, and select 'edit key'.  In the new dialogue box that comes up, paste the following into the 'Value' field:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Click, 'OK', and then close gconf-editor.  Now when you open up Epiphany and do a search, you should be looking at a result page from DDG, instead of Google.

Happy DDG'ing!

Humorous AMD Video

With CES looming, and news of AMD winning the International CES Innovations 2011 Design and Engineering Award for its Fusion APU, I have to say I am pretty excited to see Fusion finally coming to fruition.  Anyway, since Fusion is upon us, here is a funny new promotional video from AMD about fusion; watch for AMD President & CEO Dirk Meyer at the end:

GDB Tutorial

As far as GDB tutorials go, I think that Peter Salzman had one of the best.  Unfortunately, he let his site go down some time in 2008.  Now there is a site which has resurrected his old body of work - Using The GNU GDB Debugger.  It is essentially the same as it was, with some bits reorganized.  It looks pretty good.  Check it out!