--server=/foo.corp/10.11.12.13

This will look up everything “*.foo.corp” using nameserver 10.11.12.13. So far, so good. But today I also needed the reverse lookup for a specific IP adress zone to be done via a specific nameserver. Reading the manpage, I found no option for that, but then I remembered stuff that I had learnt in a distant past: that reverse lookups are actually a name lookup of the in-addr.arpa zone, with the “reversed” IP address. So I tried

  --server=/10.in-addr.arpa/10.11.12.13

and that one works fine, looking up everything 10.x.x.x using 10.11.12.13.

And it still was much easier than using ugly bind. That’s why I prefer dnsmasq in daily use over bind, dhcpd and all the other crap. It just works

There are only a few steps, following the README.SUSE in the kernel-source package:

• install the kernel-syms and kernel-source packages
• copy the kernel sources to some other place where you have write access as a normal user (this is not in the README, but I hate doing stuff like that as root, so I’m doing it anyway)
• patch the source
• build the module

Or, as an almost-copy’n'pasteable list of commands:

cd /tmp
cp -a /usr/src/linux/ . # do not only copy the symlink 
cd linux/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/
patch < /tmp/i915-nofbc.diff # your diff
make -C /usr/src/linux-obj/x86_64/desktop M=$(pwd)
ls -l i915.ko

You need to adjust the directory given to “make -C” to your desired kernel flavour, of course, but that’s it. Copy the module over to /lib/modules and reboot (I usually save the old module somewhere else, in case something goes wrong, but you probably figured that out already).

Short: there is no way you can use the mobile Internet connection of your Phone e.g. with a laptop. That’s something my (really crappy) Sony Ericsson K600i did more than 5 years ago. And almost every other phone since the availability of GPRS, even back when the connection was via IRDA and not Bluetooth.

So the Milestone (and probably almost every other Android phone) is a clumsy, heavy, but mostly useless brick.

I honestly don’t care if there are “apps” (of course at additional cost and most of them crap, or requiring that I first hack the phone for root access) that can enable functionality that should definitely be there from the start.

I probably should have insisted on getting a N900 instead.

(Sometimes I’m wondering why I am not finding easy stuff like that anymore. My wife or children would probably have found it immediately. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, because I’m not expecting it to be there? Maybe I’m just spoiled by 10 Years of using console tools for almost everything? I know that I tried to drag and drop the accounts, even though I do not really like drag-n-drop for such configuration changes, because it could happen accidentally. Or, in other words, the “Change Folder Order” menu entry is pretty well matching my personal taste of how such things should be implemented, but I did not find it anyway. Am I the usability designers nightmare after all? Who knows )

Starting it from the command line showed (wrapped for your reading pleasure):

** (claws-mail:9938): WARNING **: plugin loading error:
   /usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins/rssyl.so:
   cannot open shared object file:
   No such file or directory

Uhm, yes. This is an 64bit system, so the plugins are installed in /usr/lib64/claws-mail/…
Two possible solutions to the problem came into my mind.

• creating a softlink from /usr/lib64/claws-mail to /usr/lib/claws-mail
• changing the configuration

The second method was actually easier, and is probably more future-proof (If I reinstall the machine, I might forget to create that link…)

I checked the config file in ~/.claws-mail/clawsrc and found a section

[Plugins_GTK2]
/usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins/rssyl.so
/usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins/pgpcore.so
/usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins/smime.so
/usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins/pgpmime.so
/usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins/pgpinline.so

I simply duplicated the plugins and substituted /usr/lib with /usr/lib64. As a result, I now get the “plugin loading error”-lines on both machines, because the i586 can only find the plugins in /usr/lib and the x86-64 only those in /usr/lib64, but since claws-mail does not really care and just works, I also just ignore them.

It will be interesting what happens once I use the GUI to add another plugin, but I will care for that when it happens

For completeness, I also tried to remove and pair the phone with kbluetooth, but apart from it not working at all (never asking for a PIN), it also did not ask for the internet connection stuff. So for now, if you want Bluetooth networking, just use nm-applet and bluetooth-applet.

It was easy: ~/.xsession-errors was over 1,5GB. I looked who was wanting to tell me lots of important stuff and found out that about every KDE4 program produced several debug lines, almost every second.
Since I doubt that anybody will ever want to look at 1,5GB logfiles, I just decided to redirect it to /dev/null in /usr/bin/startkde. Now only my submitrequest number 30607 needs to be accepted into KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop, so that everyone benefits from this solution.

Note: it took 15 days for the logfile to get that big, but to be honest: I don’t want to reboot every two weeks, only to keep KDE4 from crapping my home directory.
Second Note: If there had been any significant updates in FACTORY in the last two months, I would probably not even have noticed the problem, but there were none

Notifications.

Those ugly passive pop-ups that appear on the display near the area where you have configured the “system tray” to be on the panels. From the beginning they were an example of uglyness. After quite some time they at least stopped to be drawn one over the other, so they are no longer totally unusable, but they still are not pretty.
One example: most of them are too small, so that the text they should show me gets cut off and I have to guess what the system wants to tell me.

As much as I detest GNOME, their unobtrusive notifications in the lower right corner are much more stylish and less disturbing than the KDE4 ones.

And it is not QT’s fault: a proprietary application like skype, using QT, can do it in almost the same way as GNOME, so it is definitely possible.