Network Manager Applet Tips

I know, I know…it’s been a while. I switched jobs and don’t have my T40 anymore. I was given a Dell Latitude D600 at my new job. This job is great..not a single windows server in the building I was setting up the network manager applet and couldn’t get it to see my wireless interface. It would just say “no connection” After poking around the Google for a bit, I ran across the solution.

It appears that if you’ve already accessed an access point, the nm-applet won’t see your wireless interface. The solution? Edit /etc/network/interfaces. Find the section that has the line with your access point followed by your wep key, if applicable, and delete them…yep just whack em. Right click on the nm-applet icon and disable networking. Right click on it again, enable networking, and you should be set.

I used automatix2 to install the networ manager, but you can also use apt….I think it’s just apt-get install network-manager but someone correct me if I’m wrong

Task Manager, Windows Style

A lot of us (me included) that are windows expats, got used to seeing task manager by pressing the ol’ three finger salute <ctrl><alt><del>. So can we get the same functionality in Ubuntu/Gnome? (KDE has <ctrl><esc&gt Below are the very simple instructions for getting it setup.

Before you begin, make sure that you have the Gnome system monitor installed (sudo apt-get install gnome-system-monitor)

The following need not be run as root….just your normal login.

gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_9 "<control><alt>Delete"
gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_9 "gnome-system-monitor"

That’s it, just press <ctrl><alt><del> and you should be done.

Dale

Little Problems

I love Ubuntu…Debian in general, but the Ubuntu distro is very well put together. By necessity, I have a Windows box at home, which is where I installed Edgy and Beryl. Well, apparently, my Windows install/master boot record, doesn’t like Grub….at all. I get periodic blue screens o death and my screen saver doesn’t work for whatever reason (unless I log out…odd) My system exhibited the exact same results during a previous install shortly before a hard drive failure, so I chalked it up to the bad drive. This drive is new and it is doing the EXACT same thing. I can only assume it’s Grub. I booted into the recovery console and ran fixboot and fixmbr to write a new master boot record, and thusly making Ubuntu inaccessible, hoping to rectify the issue. No luck. I still get the blue screens. So now, I have to figure out what to do about that. I think I’ll just add a second drive for Ubuntu……sadly, I’m writing this from my desktop using Windows. Any suggestions??

Dale