Analog Stereo Output with LMDE 2 Cinnamon

A new LMDE 2 Cinnamon install on a new motherboard left me with only a Digital Stereo audio profile and no sound to the analog jack.

I installed the pavucontrol utility and was able to configure the Analog Stereo profile.

How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections

Some people are concerned about the connections Firefox makes to the Internet, especially when those connections are made for no apparent reason (see Mozilla's Firefox Browser Privacy Notice for additional information). This article explains various reasons why Firefox may make a connection to the Internet and how you can stop it from doing so, if you wish.

 

Table of Contents

• Automatic updates and Security
  • Auto-update checking
  • Blocklist updating
  • Anti-phishing list updating
  • Anti-malware list updating
  • Secure website certificates
• Prefetching
  • Link prefetching
  • DNS prefetching
  • Speculative pre-connections
  • Add-on list prefetching
• User-invoked content
  • Home page loading
  • Extensions
  • Live Bookmarks updating
  • Downloads restarted
  • Search plugin icon loading
  • Firefox Sync
  • Firefox Hello
• Mozilla content
  • Tiles
  • Snippets
  • Geolocation for default search engine
  • "What's new" page
  • Add-on metadata updating
• Diagnostics
• Media capabilities
  • OpenH264 codec
  • WebRTC
  • Send Video To Device
• Malware
• Loopback connection

32-bit Eagle and 64-bit Debian 8 Jessie

To install the required a 32-bit library environment to run Eagle 6 on 64-bit Jessie:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update

Then install these:

build-essential
gcc-multilib
rpm
libstdc++6:i386
libgcc1:i386
zlib1g:i386
libncurses5:i386
libxrender1:i386
libXcursor2:i386
libfreetype6:i386
libfontconfig1:i386
libXi6:i386
libssl1.0.06:i38

Managing Eagle Projects with Git

Here are the commands I use to manage my Git repositories for my Eagle projects.

PROJECT_REPO is an environment variable designating my repository URL or path.  

Each project starts as a branch from a root project with a blank board or branches from another project.

Start a new Eagle project

Current directory is an empty project working directory.

git init
git remote add origin $PROJECT_REPO
git pull
git checkout origin/master
git checkout -b BRANCH-NAME

Pull an Eagle project
Current directory is an empty project working directory. 

git init
git remote add origin $PROJECT_REPO
git pull
git checkout BRANCH-NAME

Create and push a new branch
Current directory is the current project working directory.

git checkout -b NEW_BRANCH_NAME 

... make changes and commit ...

git push origin NEW-BRANCH-NAME

LibreOffice vs. the Liberty to Open the Application You Want

Occasionally LibreOffice seems determined to open PDF files with a web browser instead of the pertinent preferred application. Nosing around I learned that Libre/OpenOffice appears to be opening files thru /usr/bin/x-www-browser which links to /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser - a web browser startup script.

I instead linked /usr/bin/x-www-browser to /usr/bin/gnome-open which properly selects the gnome preferred application.

Win98 Guest in True Color High Resolution

I'm finding that the Win98 Vbox guest is running intolerably slow. I found this help.

... 3. Video driver integration.
By default Windows 98 will run only in 640x480 resolution, 16-colors.

Performance Note: VirtualBox is not optimized for 16-colors (4-bit) emulation. It works very slow this way.
Having 32-bit True Color driver makes Win98 VMs run on VirtualBox *much* faster.

If you want True color or high resolution, you need to download special drivers.
3.1. bearwindows driver (unstable)
http://bearwindows.boot-land.net/vbe9x.htm

NOTE: You must install "Universal version", as "VirtualBox" version is known to have problems.
WARNING: This driver is buggy, and many Windows fonts do not render correctly with it. Not recommended.

3.2. SciTech Display Doctor (recommended)
The second option is to get the SciTech Display Doctor version 7 beta driver (12 MB) -
(contributed by Richard_S)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/226caou8x0jf8 ... ctor-7.iso
-or-
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BycgkM ... UhnWGRycVE

The driver is a high quality commercial grade video driver (even includes some software emulated Open GL 3D support), and it does include an exe installer program.

Despite having an installer, the SciTech Display Doctor is a little tricky to get going. After the program launches, you have to find the little round radio button link to click to 'enable' the new driver (otherwise you still have VGA). Even then, you can't select any higher resolution modes until you ditch the 'default monitor' and select one of the 'Super VGA' types.

After fiddling around with the above changes and rebooting several times you should be able to select 800x600 or 1024x768 (or higher) resolutions with 32 bit color depth. (setting 32 bit color mode optimizes the interface with Virtualbox and really speeds things up)

Windows Boot Floppies

Trying to install an old win'98 CD to a Virtual Box machine I found that the CD is not bootable (though newer ones are). I have some old boot floppies but no physical drives set up and ready to run or copy from. Poking around I found boot floppy "images" of every kind but they're all self-extracting '.exe files. Peculiar thing  about windows folks is they seem to want to run every exe they can download to see if anything bad doesn't happen. I was willing to run one in a vbox but Wine won't allow it to write to a floppy, even a virtual one.

I found a helpful boot image  from Bob Cerelli's site, but it's an iso. I virtually booted it and copied all to a virtual floppy which was all I was looking for. Thanks Bob.