Recently I had to play with serial RS232 connections in order to control a robot we have here in the Robotics course at the ULPGC.

We have some pretty old (1989!!!) applications to control and configure the robots which used to run under DOS. I tried to run them under dosemu: unfortunately it didn't work. Maybe because the code the applications use is not really good (direct access to the hardware, incorrect driver usage etc..).

One of the features I really love about Apple's notebooks is the two fingers scrolling enabled touchpad they have.

It's easier and faster to use than the regular side scrolling available on normal notebooks.

So.. I recently had a look at the synaptics documentation (synaptics is the driver which manages the touchpads under Linux).

Well.. After some reading and a bit of google searches it turns out that is possible to enable two fingers scrolling on recent synaptics touchpads even on normal/regular notebooks (not Apple Macbooks).

I usually use Vim for command line text file editing.

Some days ago, probably due to a change in /etc/vimrc after a system update, the behavior of the mouse changed.

Selecting some text with the mouse automatically enter visual mode. I rarely use the visual feature and when I use it I prefer using the v keyboard command.

I found this new setting pretty annoying. So I decided to disable it.

When I installed Arch Linux on my notebook I choose to install LILO as Boot Loader.

Why? Because, as a long time Slackware user, I didn't use GRUB enough and I didn't have the time to learn it.

Unfortunately, maintaining an Arch Linux system with LILO as boot loader is quite tiring because every time the default kernel is changed lilo needs to be reinstalled.

The main ArchLinux ftp server recently had some bandwith problems due to a lot of people using it has their main mirror for their pacman updates.

This issues have been fixed by the archlinux administrators by throttling the bandwith of ftp.archlinux.org. This means that downloading from it will be extremely slow.

I recently converted my wired LAN to a wireless WLAN.

This is the steps I made to create a WPA-PSK secured WLAN with my Intel centrino ipw2100 wireless card under Linux.
I report here the commands and configuration files used . I hope those will be helpful for someone else.