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Om de een of andere reden hebben bijna alle toetsenborden die aan computers in Nederland zitten de Amerikaanse layout. Dat is natuurlijk geen probleem, maar als je letters met accenten moet typen (bijvoorbeeld als je ideeën hebt, of maar één) moet je moeilijk doen.

De standaard toetsenbordinstelling in Ubuntu is Amerikaans-Engels. Opzich natuurlijk goed—het gemiddelde toetsenbord is tenslotte Amerikaans—maar Amerikanen hebben geen knoppen gemakkelijk letters met accenten in te typen, dus daar moet wat op gevonden worden.

Een oplossing is gebruik maken van de "Amerikaans-Engels Internationaal (met dode toetsen)"-indeling. Dit werkt over het algemeen vrij goed, maar die "dode toetsen" zorgen ervoor dat je een extra spatie moet intypen als je een aanhalingsteken wilt typen. Vaak is dat natuurlijk geen probleem, maar sommige mensen gebruiken veel aanhalingstekens (programmeurs, bijvoorbeeld), en dan vergeet je ze nogal snel.

Na een beetje rondzoeken heb ik een oplossing gevonden: het is mogelijk om meerdere toetsenbordindelingen tegelijk actief te hebben en met een speciale toets tussen die indelingen wisselen. Je kunt er dan dus voor zorgen dat je toetsenbord de Amerikaans-Engelse indeling gebruikt, die je met die toets tijdelijk omschakelt naar Amerikaans-Engels met dode toetsen (zodat je letters met accenten kunt typen).

In de Gnome-toetsenbord-configuratie ziet dat er zo uit:

Er zijn twee mogelijkheden van schakelen. Bij sommige toetsen staat "schakelt groep bij indrukken". Dit betekent dat de toets net zo werkt als de "Shift"-toets: zo lang de toets ingedrukt is, zal de alternatieve layout actief zijn. De andere mogelijkheid is "verandert groep". De werking hiervan is vergelijkbaar met de "Lock" toetsen (zoals Caps Lock en Num Lock): de nieuwe layout is actief tot je hem (met dezelfde toets) weer uitzet.

Als je een andere toets kiest dan "Rechter Alt", dan kun je ook met die toets + Rechter Alt + 5 een euroteken intypen. Scheelt weer kopiëren uit de tekentabel :).

I got the replacement for my slow, old 1U server this week. It has loads of disk space (about 960GB), 4GB of RAM, and a Core 2 Duo CPU with the Intel virtualisation extensions. So I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (server edition), and started playing around with kvm.

Ubuntu 7.04 has all the bits you need for virtualization available. Just load the kernel modules, install the 'kvm' package, and you can start installing your virtual machines. As the VNC server inside kvm still likes to crash at unexpected moments, and I wasn't going to forward my X display just to give kvm a place to show VGA output, I had to convince the Ubuntu installer to use the serial console. This isn't as easy as I had hoped it to be (the boot menu on the installation CD requires using the 'normal' console—something I was trying to avoid).

After looking around for a while, I found the Ubuntu network installation files. These contain a special 'serial console' version, which meant I could finally install the guests using PXE. I now have two virtual machines running Ubuntu 6.06.1 on my Ubuntu 7.04 installation, and I still have room for more.

The only problem I have left is starting the kvm instances when the host system starts. I currently use screen and a few shell scripts and start them manually, but I'm thinking of creating an /etc/event.d entry. Does anyone have a better idea?

If your laptop seems to be running hot lately, and it's eating lots of battery power, you might have some old cpufreq settings for gnome-power-manager in gconf. You can reset them to their (new) default values by running the following commands:

gconftool-2 -u /apps/gnome-power-manager/cpufreq_ac_policy
gconftool-2 -u /apps/gnome-power-manager/cpufreq_battery_policy

This brought the temperature of my laptop down, so the fan isn't running all day anymore, and as a side-effect, my battery doesn't give up after an hour anymore after an hour of doing almost nothing (I get the proper 2-3 hours out of it now).

I put one of my temperature sensors outside, through the hole the previous owner used to get the cable from his satellite dish inside.

Last month I bought a new phone. I had only had my old one (a Motorola E1000) for a short while, but it just annoyed me too much. It rebooted at random times, it was slow, and the sound quality was so bad that people could never hear what I was saying. Oh, and when I connected it to the charger, it wouldn't notice about 75% of the time. Reconnecting would fix it sometimes, but still.. charging is quite a basic function of a phone (and UMTS phones suck more power than non-UMTS ones).

My new phone is a Nokia 6021. It doesn't speak UMTS ('3G'), but I didn't really use that anyway. It also doesn't have a camera—the old one had two—and I haven't missed it yet. Basically, it's just a phone (OK, the calendar is nice too) with a Bluetooth option, so I can use it as a GPRS modem. Now all I need to do is convince Vodafone to allow me to switch to a cheaper plan.

I've finally been able to get my Mac Mini to display proper 1360x768 output, without horrible scaling. It turned out that the framebuffer wouldn't accept the new resolution X asked for, and stayed on 848x480, while X would think the new resolution had been set. This, combined with the fact that X.org doesn't seem to have a built-in modeline for 1360x768, caused the breakage.

Now my "Monitor" section looks like this:

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
        Option          "DPMS"
        HorizSync       30-61
        VertRefresh     50-75
        Modeline        "1360x768" 84.50 1360 1392 1712 1744 768 783 791 807
EndSection

And my "Device" section like this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon 9200 (RV280)"
        Driver          "ati"
        BusID           "PCI:0:16:0"
        Option          "UseFBDev"      "false"
        Option          "MonitorLayout" "TMDS,NONE"
EndSection

Yesterday I went out and got a new TV. It wasn't as expensive as I had anticipated, it has a decent resolution (1366x768, good enough for DVDs) and a LOT of inputs (3x SCART, 1x RGB, 1x S-Video, VGA and DVI-D.. oh, and it also has a TV tuner).

Too bad I can't seem to teach my Mac Mini about the native resolution of the display though. Might be because it came with OS X 10.3 instead of 10.4 (or because the TV is actually crap and doesn't announce its capabilities properly). I need to try it with an Ubuntu Live CD soon :)