This is more to remind myself how to do this, but this is pretty cool (from here ):

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name} %{size}\n' | sort -n +1 | column -t

That lists your installed packages by size, largest last. Very nice if you just want to get rid of large packages you no longer need.

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.