David Latham

Today I bought myself a wifi adapter for my Opensuse desktop PC. I was tired of running a network cable across the carpet to my modem. The model I bought was an ASUS USB-N10 Nano from PB Technologies in Henderson. It was less than $20 so I thought a good deal. When I bought it, I completely ignored all the printed garbage about support for Windows and Mac and figured, that it will be supported under linux. It is supported under Linux but it was not too simple to set up on my Opensuse. In the end and after much google-ing, I found this repository: https://github.com/pvaret/rtl8192cu-fixes The driver that ships with the kernel is not so hot. The network keeps dropping even though it appears to remain connected. With this version, things are much more stable. Also it compiles nicely under the latest kernel. The proprietry driver from Realtek did not compile under the kernel shipped with Opensuse 13.1. So here is what I ended up doing: ~ git clone https://github.com/pv...

The Problem: If you have a Synaptics touch-pad like the one I have on my HP ProBook 6560b, you might want to learn how to disable the touch-pad while typing. This particular laptop has a touch-pad that is positioned poorly so it is common for your palm to be in contact with the pad while you type. The solution is to disable it for 2 seconds while typing. It is a minor inconvenience to have to wait two seconds to use it again but at least your typing is uninterrupted which could be a major inconvenience.  The solution: Use the syndaemon tool that ships with the synaptics packages. In my case they shipped by default. You could always try the gui... david.latham@davepc:~> cat bin/touchpad.sh #!/bin/bash syndaemon -k -i 2 -d Now just configure your desktop manager to run this script on start up. It is a trivial thing to do in KDE under system settings -> Sartup and Shutdown, Add Script...

openSuSE and, I guess, Fedora have introduced their own firewall (iptables) configuration guis and services that try to make the job of configuring iptables easy.  While that might be useful in a standard desktop environment, I found that it didn't do much for my Virtualbox nat . I couldn't create the masqerade rules very easily and I didn't want all the extensive rules governing types of ICMP traffic and logging.  As the SuSEfirewall2 service GUI didn't help and the configuration files were too complicated for this old school blogger, I decided to roll my own script. On my system, I simply disable the SuSEfirewall2 service and then call this script on boot. You can find this script and any changes I make to it on my github .  Of course, I won't be putting every rule I have in place online, that would be a crazy security risk.  I just wanted to show the basics that can be easily extended by adding more rules into the filter section. #!/bin/bash IPT=/usr/sbi...