If you are getting annoying sounds in Xfce (like when opening/closing windows and such), just uninstall the canberra-gtk package. Something like sudo urpme canberra-gtk should do it.

Okay, I noted a few months back that I and many other people noticed and hated that the Gnome terminal all of a sudden did not have an option to turn off the cursor blinking, but was tied to a global option to turn all cursor blinking on or off.

Well, I recently installed Mandriva 2009 and guess what…the cursor still blinks and there is still no option to turn it off. However, I was able to find a way:

• Run gconf-editor (you can install it with sudo urpmi gconf-editor)
• Navigate to /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/
• Set the key “cursor_blink_mode” to off (You can add the key if needed by right-clicking and selecting “New Key”)

Now I get to use the Gnome terminal (my favorite, for some reason) and not have to see that horribly blinking cursor. Yay.

Yesterday I finally decided to update my computer from Mandriva 2007 Spring (soooo old) to 2008 Spring. I had a feeling it would be a hassle, so I had been putting it off for a long time. But it was feeling really old, so I knew the time had come.

Fortunately, I was smart and backed up everything to my ‘storage’ hard drive. Typically when I upgrade Mandriva, I just wipe out everything but the home partition. I had planned to do the same this time, but I wanted to back everything up anyway.

Now, I don’t blame Mandriva for this, because I have had my main hard drives in a faulty RAID set up for some time. I’ve just ignored it. But it ended up causing some serious problems, so I finally deleted the array and wiped out one of the hard drives to start fresh.

One other thing was annoying. During the installation, Mandriva asked if I wanted to install the propriety nVidia drivers for my video card. I thought, “Sure! Saves me the hassle.” Supposedly it did so, but either it messed up or the driver was dog slow. So I had to remove it and then compile and install the driver directly from nVidia. Works great.

Everything else seems to be working right. I hate some of the defaults in Xfce now, but I’ve fixed them up.