However, on Mac, it’s not really straightforward, due to the way they
handle applications. The comments in this
post pointed me in the right direction for how to set this up.

• Install Firefox.
• Install Aquamacs.
• Install It’s All Text Firefox Extension.
• In Firefox, go to Tools -> It’s All Text > Preferences, and set Editor to /Applications/Aquamacs Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs Emacs

The default proportional font in aquamacs bugs me, so I fix that by
launching it with a textarea and going to Options -> Appearance
-> Font For Text-Mode and setting it to Andale Mono. I also turn
off Soft Word Wrap and Auto Word Wrap In Text Modes under options,
because I’m used to emacs’s old unfriendly behavior.

Fortunately, the community is already on the case, and until VMware ships an official update, aldeby.org provides these helpful instructions. Perfect!

Quick summary:

* In one terminal, run: while true; do sudo killall -9 vmware-modconfig-console; sleep 1; done
* In a second terminal, run: sudo ./VMware-Workstation-6.5.3-185404.i386.bundle --ignore-errors
* Kill loop in first terminal.
* Run: sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all
* Edit /etc/vmware/bootstrap to add the line: VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=force
* If you have ~/.vmware/config, make sure the xkeymap.nokeycodeMap is commented out (previous keymap fix for Vmware/Intrepid).

Let’s hope it’s better than Jaunty, which I found to be a bit of a dog.


echo 'xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true' > ~/.vmware/config


Add the following to the end of .bashrc:


if test $SSH_AUTH_SOCK && [ $SSH_AUTH_SOCK != "/tmp/ssh-agent-$USER-screen" ]
then
rm -f /tmp/ssh-agent-$USER-screen
ln -sf "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" "/tmp/ssh-agent-$USER-screen"
fi


This creates a symlink to your actual $SSH_AUTH_SOCK, but only if it isn’t set to your symlink.

Add the following to your .screenrc:


setenv SSH_AUTH_SOCK "/tmp/ssh-agent-$USER-screen"


That should do the trick.

First, you’re going to need the ability to create NTFS file systems, so install ntfsprogs:

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Next, connect your external drive. In my case, I’m formatting a Western Digital WDElements 1 TB external USB hard drive. This auto-mounted for me at /media/Elements. If I run df -k I can see the drive to get the disk ID:

$ df -k
[...misc output...]
/dev/sdb1            976521568       128 976521440   1% /media/Elements

Ah, so it’s at /dev/sdb. First, we blow away the partition and re-create it as NTFS. Warning: you are going to be destroying all the data on the drive! Make sure you have the write drive designation, or you could lose data on your other drives!

$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

Options to select:

• ‘d’ to delete the partition
• ‘n’ to create a new partition
• ‘p’ for primary
• ’1′ for partition number
• ‘Enter’ for first cylinder (default 1)
• ‘Enter’ for last cylinder (default of max size)
• ‘t’ for type
• ‘L’ to list codes, and enter code for HPFS/NTFS. In my case, it’s ’7′
• ‘w’ to write changes to disk, and exit
• sudo umount /dev/sdb1

In the last step, I unmount the partition, because Ubuntu auto-mounted it again for me. Now, we need to create the file system. There are two ways to go about it: the impatient way (Quick Format), or the better but much longer way (Full Format).

Quick Format

This just allocates the disk space, but doesn’t zero out the drive or check for bad sectors. This means it’ll take a few seconds.

sudo mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sdb1

Full Format

If you’re much more concerned about data integrity and don’t mind waiting, do a full format. This may take a few hours to zero out a large drive!

sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdb1

That’s it!

Some other caveats:

• NTFS is a journaling file system, which means changes may not be immediately applied. Always unmount a drive before disconnecting.
• If you’re extra paranoid, run a ‘sync’ before you unmount the drive, to be sure that changes are written.
• Windows is also quite paranoid about this, so always safely unmount the drive before disconnecting. Otherwise, you may find you can’t access the drive at all under Linux, until you mount it under Windows first to recover the journal.

• Download the Amazon MP3 Downloader (for Ubuntu 8.10): http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html/ref=sv_dmusic_3
• sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture amazonmp3.deb
• Download http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb
• sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb
• sudo getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3
• sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns (I already had this installed.)

After you install, you have to click a link to tell Amazon that you have it installed, and it’ll probably try to open it in your web browser, and fail. Go to Edit, Preferences, Applications tab, and you should see an entry for AmazonMP3 download queue. Under Action, pull down the drop down and select “Use other…”, and browse to {{{/usr/bin/amazonmp3}}}. That should do it.

References:

• Ubuntu Forums: getlibs: Automatically solves dependencies for 32-bit programs on 64-bit
• Earlycj5’s Weblog: Amazon MP3 Downloader installation for Ubuntu 64 Bit

Can't call method "value" on an undefined value at /usr/share/perl5/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm line 64.

As it turns out, there’s a whole slew of Compress::Zlib modules and IO::Compress modules that are all related. They are all packaged separately, and have the same version numbers. The problem happens if you upgrade one of the modules, without upgrading all of them.

The solution: make sure to upgrade all the modules to the same version at the same time. This means that if you’re using CPAN, you might have to install the remainder by hand. A good check to find what modules differ for you is to run dpkg -l | grep compress | grep perl, and make sure versions match up.

I’ve heard that if you use the Back button to get out of applications, it actually shuts them down. That doesn’t seem to work for me, though. I’ve also heard that the new firmware (not yet released) will include a process manager, which should preclude the need to soft reset the phone.