Normal service has now been resumed.

You login to, or start, X as a regular user as you rightly should, but you want to be able to su to root and then run a GUI application as root.

There are a number of ways to do this, some better than others, including using “kdesu”, “xhost” etc; the simplest however is:

… where xuser is the user you are running X as. The export line may not be required depending on how you became root.

The root shell you are in now has full authority to communicate with and manipulate X.

You get to the login screen and attempt to login and it says:
“This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can log on. Do you want to activate Windows now?”. If you try and activate Windows over the Internet it will appear to be successful, but log you straight back off again and put you back where you started. If you try and activate over the telephone, there will be no “Installation ID” for you to give in order to activate; this is what I believe to be the root cause of the problem.

The Installation ID is generated from information about your computer including information from the graphics adapter, the hard disk controller etc. If there is a problem getting identification information from any of the devices it uses, the routine that generates an Installation ID will return 0 and you will have no ID, no activation and no use of XP.

Fun, huh?

I am still working on the problem at the moment, but I am led to believe that slip-streaming SP3 with the installation will solve the problem and that’s what I’m working on right now. It’s also possible that enough modifications to the virtual hardware configuration will bypass whatever is acting as a faulty component, but I’m hoping to avoid resolving the problem by manually tweaking every single hardware setting until I find what works.

UPDATE:
SUCCESS!! I slip-streamed SP3 into my standard SP2-OEM disk and it works perfectly, no activation issues whatsoever.

In practice this means that when you attempt to, for example, telnet to a Solaris 9 box that has “nis” specified within nsswitch.conf, it will do a lookup on the passwd.byname map from NIS. If that map is a shadowed passwd file, it will assume the “x” password field is actually the hashed password, and therefore authentication will fail.

I came across this after discovering that users could not login to a Solaris 9 client after not doing so for a long time. Since they last logged in successfully the NIS server had been migrated from a Solaris 7 box to a Slackware 12.2 box. The bizarre part being that the Solaris 7 server did store passwords in a shadow file. While I can’t confirm it now that the Solaris 7 box is no longer with us, I believe that the Solaris 7 NIS server was combining the passwd and shadow files to provide merged output when the passwd map was queried. The Slackware/Linux NIS server certainly doesn’t do this and instead provides separate passwd and shadow maps.

The issue I’ve been dealing with is that, ever since upgrading the e-mail server and an upgrade to Dovecot, Thunderbird has been playing havoc with attachments accessed via IMAP. Some have been corrupted, some have been nothing but empty files. I would love to blame Dovecot for this, but this one is Thunderbird’s fault.

In the same way that Thunderbird downloads just the message headers until you specify a message you want to view, it only downloads certain parts of a MIME message that you have opened until you choose to request the other parts. In my case, it hasn’t been doing the job properly and isn’t pulling the extra MIME parts when they are asked for.

It’s still not clear precisely what Thunderbird is actually doing and what it intends to do, but the simple solution is to modify the config and tell it to stop trying to be clever.

about:config

mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks false
mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks false

mail.imap.mime_parts_on_demand false
mail.server.default.parts_on_demand false

This has proven successful on both Slackware and WindowsXP.

or (thanks to mosk0bit)

The astute will notice the “J” and the “xz”. J tells tar to compress with xz compression (formerly lzma) which is significantly better than gzip especially with the type of files you will expect to have in your hidden directories. If J is not available in your version of tar, use z instead.

Neither of these solutions are absolutely perfect, but they are at least simple. For the perfect score, see slava_dp’s comment:
http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/tarring-up-just-the-dotfiles/#comment-478

On my desk, I have two machines, both with identical Big Ol’ Dell Keyboards. But I have swapped the keys around on the one on the left to make it a Dvorak-UK layout. The box on the right is my main working desktop (Slackware-13.0) and the one on the left is mainly for IRC run out of tty2 although I also use it for live testing when writing code. Because the IRC box is the Dvorak box, all I do is type which gives me a lot of practice.

I got past the hunt-and-peck stage in about 6 weeks, and slowly started getting better from there. I still have trouble with M and W being next to each other, and I often grab the wrong vowel, but other than that I’ve gotten pretty good. Sometimes I get so comfortable I reach over to the QWERTY keyboard and momentarily forget how to type; but that’s only occasionally. I think I do pretty well swapping between the two.

I now have a new skill for my CV and the ability to fend off RSI later in life. I feel I have accomplished something.

Some notes:

• Do not bother trying to find a Dvorak keyboard – people just don’t sell them – rearrange one you have.
• Pick a good keyboard to re-arrange. Try to find one that has no curvature so the keys are all the same dimensions and set at the same angle.
• In a linux console: `loadkeys dvorak` will give you a Dvorak (US) layout instantly.
• In Slackware 13.0, tell hald about your new keyboard as in my earlier post so it works in X.

I urge everyone to spend a little time reading DVZine to rid you of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about Dvorak. There’s a lot of misinformation out there and DVZine will put you straight.

Have fun.

So here it is, this is my blog. Hopefully it will soon contain tomes of useful information for other SysAdmins and hobbyists. The first few posts will mostly be things that I’ve been saving up for some time.

Please feel free to comment.