The Greatest Linux Blog on the Internets. » archive for October, 2007

Fixing the arrow keys in Vim

  • October 31st, 2007

Are your Vim / Vi arrow keys making A,C, B etc characters instead of moving around in insert (’i') mode ?

Try typing this … it fixes it for me:

:set nocompatible

Or, add the line:

set nocompatible

to your ~/.vimrc file.

Subscribing to YouTube channels in Miro

  • October 23rd, 2007

Here’s a tip for using Miro (formerly Democracy Player), the kick-ass TV-on-your-computer video playing software.

If you want to subscribe to the videos of a particular user on YouTube, you can get an RSS feed of those videos by adding a channel like this to Miro:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert username here]/videos.rss

You can also get RSS feeds for all videos with a particular tag, like:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/linux.rss

Where in this case, the tag you are interested in is ‘linux’.

I discovered this when trying to figure out to subscribe to somecallmejim’s “Edit” video editing tips videos. He’s been offline for a few months now … hope his problems pass over and he comes back.

Official YouTube docs about this feature are here.

Mounting USB key in Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10, the usefree error

  • October 22nd, 2007

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 to Gutsy 7.10.

The upgrade went reasonably well with no serious breakage worth mentioning … except my FAT formatted USB key would no longer mount. It kept giving an error about not liking the mount option usefree.

Here is the fix, from the Ubuntu forums:

Go into gconf-editor and navigate to /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options

Remove the “usefree” option from the list.

Exit gconf-editor, and try hotplugging your drive again.

Your USB key should mount as expected now.

Cheers to Dan Lenski and Dow Franklin Dudley for providing this fix !

Hardware4Linux

  • October 7th, 2007

Hey, just found this new hardware compatibility database for Linux. It’s still fairly young, but already has lots of data about hardware compatibility, including distro specific info.

Worth watching & checking before buying new hardware.