So I was getting permission denied errors when attempting to establish an outgoing network connection to an smtp server from a PHP script running under the Apache webserver on a Fedora Core 13 box.  To get familiar with it, I've left SELinux enabled and, as they occur, I track down the issues it raises. One SELinux ... Read Full Article

Ages ago, I used to know the SMTP protocol by heart but these days I actually telnet into a mail server to diagnose problems so rarely that I forget the details. I could have sworn I had put an article up about this, but can't find it, so here goes. Telnet 25 localhost HELO test.com MAIL From: test@ ... Read Full Article

You would think that an editing tool would be included by default but it is not. So after some searching I discovered the tool needed is "alacarte". To install, as root in a terminal window: yum install alacarte After installation there will be a new menu item called System->Preference->Main Menu which will let you e ... Read Full Article

I'm repeating my experiment with the Lenovo Thinkpad X100E. I picked one up directly from Lenovo. The product page is [here][1]. (not an affiliate link) I got the "Elite" version with the AMD Turion Neo X2 Dual-Core L625 (1.6GHz, 800MHz, 1MB L2) processor, 4 gigs of ram and a 320 gig drive. It's got a realtek wire ... Read Full Article

One of the problems I face these days is that I do too many disparate things. As a result, some uncommon tasks take a little while to get figured out.  In this particular case I had a directory of photos spanning a few days. I wanted to use the dates of the photos to copy them into separate directories spanning the fo ... Read Full Article

For Droid owners: [http://androidforums.com/how-tips/17407-motorola-droid-ultra-faq.html ][1] [1]: http://androidforums.com/how-tips/17407-motorola-droid-ultra-faq.html%20 ... Read Full Article

Every once in a while, under Fedora Core 12, keyboard auto-repeat will be turned off for some strange reason. To restore keyboard auto-repeat without having to restart Xwindows use the commant: > **xset r**  See the man page for more information on the xset command. ... Read Full Article

I have finally given up on Ubuntu 9.10. I should have done that some time ago. I've switched to Fedora Core 12, which I was loathe to do because of some very bad experiences with previous versions. I'm happy to report that FC 12 suffers from none of the problems I saw in Ubuntu.  Networking works. Sound works. It' ... Read Full Article

One of the most frustrating things about Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.10 (and 9.04) is the random but frequent 20 sec DNS lookup delay that happens when IPV6 is enabled. Apparently, the resolver first attempts an IPV6 lookup, even if no interfaces are defined. It will sit and time out, at random, for 20 seconds before attempting t ... Read Full Article