Using Gimp on a netbook

That’s right, I am officially crazy enough to try to use Gimp on a netbook.  While they may be small and underpowered, the ability to use an advanced image editor can come in handy at the most unexpected times (and often does!)  There are a few tricks needed to make Gimp’s tools fit on the screen of a netbook, though, particularly a 7″ netbook like my Sylvania G, and I shall reveal them now.

The biggest problem is the sheer quantity of space the two default toolkits take up.  Fortunately, these are highly customizable, and we can take advantage of a simple drag-and-drop to fix the issue.  Under the toolbox on the left pane, you’ll see a series of tabs.  Simply take all the tabs on the right pane and drag them down to this tab bar, and right-click and “close” any tabs you’ll never use (the brushes tab, for example, is not necessary unless you work with lots and lots of custom brushes!)  Pulling all the right-hand tools into the left-hand tools lets you remove the right pane entirely, freeing up oodles of space.  This is the most important goal: to dump a pane and reclaim what little viewing space we have in the first place.

Another big key to shrinking the toolbox is changing the theme from the Default to Small.  To do this, simply open the Gimp Preferences (look under the File menu) and click Theme in the left side of the window, then change it in the right side to the Small theme, and click OK.  Your toolbox tool icons should shrink significantly and more of your toolbox will become visible.  If you haven’t shrunk it vertically yet, now is a good time to do so.  You’ll need to toy with the vertical and horizontal size of the toolbox until it all (or most of it, anyway) fits on the screen well.

But wait!  In Gimp 2.6, they added some pesky eyes to everything!  That’s “Wilber,” the Gimp mascot, and while it might be cute and acceptable on a 17″ widescreen, I have 800×480 dots to work with and Wilber’s eyes will actually force the bottom of the left pane off-screen, even if I shrink it to its lowest vertical height.  What to do?

It’s quite simple, actually.  To remove the “eyes” of Wilber from the top of the Gimp toolbox, you need to find the “gimprc” file and add a line to it  The hard part is finding the file, but we can make that process easy.  If you’re using Linux, it’s under ~/.gimp or ~/.gimp-2.6 or something similar; on Windows, it’s under your Application Data folder in your user profile.  Windows users can simplify the process by using the Windows search function to locate “gimprc” instead of fishing around.

When you try to open gimprc on Windows, you will be asked what to open it with.  Normally I’d tell you to use Notepad, but Gimp may use Unix-style newlines which will render the file unreadable to a normal person in Notepad.  WordPad will open the file properly and should save it okay as well, so use Wordpad.  (If you’re a power user, why aren’t you using Notepad++ yet?!)  Go to the end of the file and add the following line to it:

(toolbox-wilber no)

Save the file and run Gimp to check that the eyes are gone.  If they aren’t, make sure you spelled it right, otherwise feel free to enjoy Gimp on your netbook!

Google Chrome OS: Why it will suck, and why I don’t want it

Ah, yes, the much-speculated Google Operating System.  Rumors about a possible OS from Google have been floating about for years now, and it seems that Google has finally delivered the cornucopia of computing goodness to your door.  Coming soon to a netbook near you:  Google’s new operating system.  The news is practically flooded with articles about why Google’s fancy new OS is so important and interesting.

I’m here to tell you why it sucks, and why it isn’t really that special at all.

First and foremost, Chrome OS is based on Linux, and Linux has already been out for a long time, with Ubuntu being the most well-known and possibly the most available distribution.  What makes Chrome OS different from any other Linux distro?  It’s Linux with yet another face, but under the hood it still shares far too much with Linux to be considered its own “operating system.”  (Watch for my next post to clarify the difference between a true operating system and what is merely labeled an OS but in fact is more of a “software environment.”)  Chrome OS = Linux with another pretty face.  End of story.  If you want Linux, download Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora or ArchLinux.  At least they offer up real applications and a fully featured environment…

Second, Chrome OS suffers from the most serious problem that other “cloud-centric” distributions of Linux are plagued with: the all-too-often wrong assumption that the computer will be connected to the Internet most of the time.  The OS is centered around the Chrome browser and the primary apps are online apps, with support for traditional offline apps likely to be minimal.  Case in point: gOS, which came with my Sylvania G netbook.  The first thing I did was toss out gOS and install something else–anything else– because it was such a nuisance.  gOS comes with icons for OpenOffice.org and Firefox, and that’s really about it.  Every other “application” seemed to be Internet-enabled.  Most of the “applications” were Google, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Google Docs, and other garbage that requires a (fast) Internet connection to work.  What good is having an ultraportable laptop if you need an Internet connection to use 90% of its functionality?  That’s one reason I documented some of the things you can do to get more out of the G netbook, because it actually comes with the majority of the standard GNOME environment, which includes a significant number of games, control panels, applications, and other tools…none of which has an icon in the default installation at all!  Chrome OS is doomed to suffer the same fate, because it is nothing more than “gOS reloaded” for all intents and purposes.

FEW PEOPLE WANT TO BE TETHERED TO THE INTERNET WITH THEIR LAPTOPS AT ALL TIMES.  LEARN THIS, GENIUSES: INTERNET APPLICATIONS SUCK.

Which brings us to my third point:  INTERNET APPLICATIONS SUCK. The ones that don’t suck aren’t Internet applications at all.  I don’t know anyone that uses Google Docs, and Google Docs is no replacement for an installation of OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office.  One might be tempted to counter with a mention of the heavily-used Google SketchUp or Google Earth, but the difference is that those are true applications which just happen to be Internet-enabled or come from a site on the Internet.  Google Earth uses data pulled from the Internet, and Google Earth totally rocks.  Google Docs, though, is sparse on features and not very compatible with other office applications.  It is not a viable replacement for a real office package for most people, and it feels like “Microsoft Works lite” in general.  Looking beyond Google, we see sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and other “social networking” sites taking longer and longer to load, being plagued by excessive use of widgets, and other serious issues.  Contrast this with traditional instant messenger applications and even the ever-hated AOL, which may not be the smallest programs in existence, but provide much better performance, a larger feature set, and better integration with other programs.  Internet applications are limited in their implementation and capabilities, as well as by the lack of proper support for industry standards that have been around for a long time now.

What’s very depressing is that I actually see many reputable sites hyping Chrome OS and discussing whether or not it threatens Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or even embedded operating systems.  Chrome OS is nothing more than a Linux distribution with a stupid idea behind it, and Google has spent considerable time and money on dumber things (can you say YouTube?)  This isn’t like Android, which opened up options in the mobile phone market considerably.  This is something targeted at machines that can already do more than Chrome OS can do.

In short, Google Chrome OS is obsolete before it ever rolls out.  Apparently, I’m not exactly alone in my opinions, and this article sums it all up quite nicely.

The Sylvania G dies, but yields an AWESOME customer service experience.

It’s official: something went severely wrong with the Sylvania G netbook I bought in October.  The keyboard AND POWER BUTTON will completely “lock up” at random and QUICKLY, yet the computer itself still runs in the background, and the hard drive developed a couple of bad sectors (which I remedied by doing a zero fill–more on that in another post).  It’s fairly unusable now, and it’s still within the warranty period, so I called up Sylvania’s support number for help.  The company that actually makes these netbooks is called Digital Gadgets, and it is them who I have dealt with.  So, how did it go?

I haven’t been this happy about a customer service experience EVER.

I explained to the tech that I bought the netbook in October 2008, that I run a computer service shop, and detailed heavily what was wrong and the evidence that I had gathered to make my judgment call that the netbook was screwed up.  Apparently the ink used for the serial number sticker is poor, because it had smudged off to the point that it was unreadable, which I made very clear early on in the call.  This is about where you would expect me to spew off about the run-around I was given and the stupid hoops I had to jump through to prove to the person that it was indeed screwed up, because 99.9% of service and support agents have almost no authority to help customers and are usually in the business of preventing warranty returns at any cost.

But that didn’t happen, not even a tiny little bit.  No run-around?  Surely I jest, right?  WRONG!

The tech support agent, named William Lee, promptly started the process of generating an RMA and took my shipping address to send a totally free return shipping box to.  About eight hours later (and after business hours, no less) I had an RMA number in my email inbox, with instructions on what to do when the box arrived.  As of this writing, the box hasn’t yet appeared, but that’s because I only called them a couple of days ago.

It is astonishingly refreshing to be able to deal with someone like William.  He did everything exactly right, without a single flaw in his procedure.  He LISTENED TO THE CUSTOMER’S PROBLEM, taking the time to ensure he understood exactly what was going on from my perspective.  He also BELIEVED THE CUSTOMER’S STORY AND EXHIBITED BELIEF IN THE CUSTOMER’S GOOD FAITH, which is the exact opposite of what most suppot agents do: showing a lack of faith and general distrust of the customer right off the bat.  Because he LISTENED and BELIEVED, this brought about the UNDERSTANDING  that there was a clear issue covered under the warranty which needed to be resolved quickly as possible.  Within a reasonable time frame, he PROVIDED A SPEEDY RESOLUTION TO THE CUSTOMER’S PROBLEM.

Let me explain exactly why I am writing in this fashion.  William’s example should be followed by all companies, and sadly it is almost nonexistent in the corporate customer service landscape of today.  The benefits to the customer (in this case, myself) are fairly obvious: the problem was resolved quickly and the customer’s precious time was not wasted to achieve that resolution.  But what about the benefits of William’s actions to the BUSINESS?

1. William spent as little time as possible chatting it up on the telephone.  This left William free to service other customers, reducing overall load on the customer service department at Digital Gadgets.  It also made William a much more valuable asset to the company, because William is able to service more customers than an agent who is given no authority and is required by the company to simply  toss customers through hoops.
2. On the flip side, William did not abbreviate our conversation.  He spent the time required to understand my situation, but did not ask me to perform senseless exercises when it was quite clear that the problem was hardware-related and not fixable over the phone.
3. I was heard but not patronized, AND a SIMPLE solution was presented QUICKLY.  This greatly increases my faith in Digital Gadgets as one of their customers, increasing the chances that I will purchase from them in the future AND RECOMMEND THEIR PRODUCTS TO OTHERS  AS WELL.  Over time and across many customers who are similarly situated, this leads to MORE SALES, which can quickly and easily exceed the cost of a warranty repair on my one individual netbook.

William is doing it right.  Other businesses could take a few lessons from how he handled my situation.  I can’t wait to get my fixed toy back in good working order, and I’m very happy to have bought a computer from a company that treats me like a customer should be treated.

Time ensures that things rarely remain the same.

At Tritech, many things have changed since even just one month ago.  Here’s a spiffy list of such things.  By the way, my new favorite word is “terse.”  The magic of the word “terse” is that practically all of its synonyms not as terse as “terse.”  It’s a self-fulfilling definition!  ^_^  So, what’s been going on during my silence, you ask?  Read on!

• My Sylvania G has an unusual issue with the custom Linux installs I’ve done on it where the keyboard and mouse touchpad stop working.  This didn’t happen while I had Windows XP on it whatsoever, nor the custom gOS that came with the computer, so I’m fairly sure it has something to do with a more generic (read: not G-specific) Linux distro running on the VIA CX700M2/C7-M platform.  I doubt it’s the hardware itself because of this.  The headphone jack worked on XP, but not on my custom Linux, which apparently is caused by an incorrect HD Audio pin mapping in the HD Audio drivers in the stock Linux kernel.  I’m not too concerned about it, though, since I haven’t needed to use it much at all lately.
• I’m still working on the custom Tritech Service System.  It’s grown from a very humble project to simply give us basic remote access to a machine in a clean operating environment to a much more useful general service system.  Big secret: it’s a Linux-based project.  The entire “distro” is essentially built from scratch, however, and uses such classic tools as busybox to minimize space usage.  What really sets TSS apart from the Linux solutions we’re using now such as KNOPPIX (CD) and Slax (USB drive) is the fact that the entire system runs out of an initramfs, eliminating the need to find the rest of the system after booting has started.  This presents some extremely tough limitations, but solves the biggest problems I’ve run into with Linux live CD and Linux live USB distributions.  Sometimes the rest of the system can’t be located at boot-time, which on KNOPPIX in specific “crashes” to a “very minimal shell” in which you can essentially do nothing at all.  When a CD drive is old, dirty, or otherwise impaired, you can have these failures as well as major problems when the KNOPPIX cloop driver chokes on every little scratch in the disc surface.  Slax sucks because it constantly spews out OOPSes in the kernel log when you don’t use a “fresh mode” to boot, and since it doesn’t come with any of the specific tools we need (and the only way to properly add them is to make a squashfs thing I don’t feel like dealing with) it’s a huge pain in the rectum.  Enter the Tritech Service System: completely customized for our own exact needs, reliant only on the bootloader working as expected and not locking a CD drive or USB flash drive in the process, and EXTREMELY FAST to work with.  Plus I made a cool green-on-black splash screen to go with it.  The fact that it easily installs on any Windows XP machine as a boot menu option seals the deal.  NO OTHER COMPUTER SERVICE COMPANY HAS THIS POWERFUL TOOL.  Granted, any sufficiently skilled Linux nut could do what I’ve done, but most Linux nuts would rather deal with KNOPPIX forever than go to the trouble of making their own custom distro from scratch.  The lack of Linux-knowledgeable techs out there makes it impractical for a large company to even bother with.  Now all of you that thought my claim of being the only company that is capable of doing this was audacious can understand exactly why I can make that claim and support it.  We’re not to the point that I’m willing to release it to the public yet, but it’s been so much better than KNOPPIX or Slax on every system I can boot it on that I’ve fast-tracked my development on it and I’m making it a very high priority on my list of things to do.  Stay tuned.
• We cleaned up the shop.  I’m not kidding: we REALLY CLEANED UP THE SHOP, big time.  One unfortunate problem with computer geeks is a complete lack of organization, particularly with a shop as busy as mine usually is.  We didn’t have many customers at all over the past week, so I took full advantage of the opportunity to give the place a brutal cleaning.  We’ve moved all the security camera equipment, run permanent wires that we’ve been using temps for for months now, purchased lots of additional storage bins and shelving and made excessive use of all of it, organized and better proceduralized the process of shuffling customer equipment in and out and keeping said equipment organized and together, tossed out an insane number of disintegrating cardboard boxes we REALLY didn’t need, built a central working “kiosk” at the front of the shop where we can print invoices and perform other administrative tasks (where previously all of this work was done on our own individual workstations in the back of the shop), optimized the table configuration for better access to existing power and network cables, completely cleared off the bird’s nest of wires that had formed on the front tables due to lots of working and no time to clean up after it, and a ton of other minor things I don’t even want to think about right now.
• I mowed the lawn at my house.  Like an idiot, I did so at 4 PM instead of waiting until it started to get cooler in the evening.  Boy, push mowers SUCK.
• Yes, the last item was comic relief.  So is this one.
• I recently managed to use Linux to fully change XP HALs, rendering all of my disparate XP “clean system images” obsolete.  I’m actually looking at ways to get chntpw/reged to be easily scripted.  They’re the most useful and most underdeveloped Windows tools on Linux that I know of, and a reged that is inherently script-friendly (without using expect) would be a boon to the Tritech Service System, as well as frustrated sysadmins in general around the world.  With a fully scriptable reged/chntpw, I can write a simple package for TSS that replaces HALs on images without any additional effort, making life much easier for my technicians (and myself) in the long run!
• We also created a custom HAL.INF file that opens up access to all the XP HALs from XP itself.  Reverting to “Standard PC” pre-imaging and then using this file in the images to allow changing to, say, “ACPI Multiprocessor PC” would be much easier than having six images per XP type (home retail/OEM, pro retail/OEM, MCE OEM) and would save TONS of disk space on the poor old server.
• I’m also writing a custom Web-based Tritech administration system using PHP and MySQL (well duh), which will let me throw a bunch of crap out of my filing cabinet and go nearly paperless.  Invoice creation will also be much easier, because invoices, work orders, and inventory usage share huge amounts of information between them already, so invoice creation would essentially be a two-click thing for most jobs.
• We raised our prices.  Let’s face it: we charge by the half-hour already, and $80 per hour is outrageously cheap for access to my skills and the skills of the technicians I contract work to and teach my ways to.  We may need to go up again, and I’d love some feedback on that.  I feel that we should because we’re selling a level of quality that Siler City, Pittsboro, Goldston, and all the other towns in Chatham County can’t get within an hour’s driving distance, but of course I fear pricing myself out of business at the same time.  Given the economic climate right now, I’m not keen on going up too fast, but we could use some capital SOON.  Plus, that pesky $65,000 in small business loans is still hanging over my head, sucking up essentially all of the “profits” and converting them to expenses.  The rest is used to buy what we need to keep serving customers in the future.  Even if we charged $100 per hour, our competitors’ bench fees and rates put them at or above that price tag on almost every job, and unfortunately Chatham County’s pre-existing computer service shops apparently have the worst customer service and/or technical skill you can imagine, considering we hear horrible anecdotes from multiple customers on a DAILY BASIS about who we’re supposedly “competiing with.”  I’d hardly call them competition at this point; we’ve had two separate laptops come in that I personally serviced where Siler City’s established computer shop I won’t name had charged $100 or more to look at each and came back with the answer that “it’s unfixable, you need to buy a new laptop.”  In both cases, I fixed the problem in less than five minutes.  One was a loose LCD data cable behind the laptop screen, the other was a RAM stick either making bad contact or the SODIMM socket going out (I moved the stick from one socket to the other.)  I’m so upset when these things happen, and I know I shouldn’t be, but I feel that these things tarnish the reputation of the industry as a whole and bring customers to my door wondering if I’m going to screw them over before they’ve even met anyone on my staff.  I digress a bit, though; should I raise prices from $40 per half hour to $50 per half hour?  What do you think?
• We now have four technicians that come here to get jobs regularly, and all of them are awesome at what they do.  They really care about my customers, and that’s what I like!

That’s about it for now.  I have a repair job I’m working on that I must return to, so I have to wrap this post up.  A construction company owner and long-time client of mine got a HORRIBLE virus infection, and I have gone very far out of my way to personally see to it that he’s back up by 8 AM tomorrow (Monday) morning.  His system went down completely on Friday.  If you’re a client or potential client of my business, I want you to know that just like I’m doing for his business, I will bend over backwards and do whatever I must to make sure you’re taken care of.  I’ll post more anecdotes about how I do this later.  That’s all, folks.  Happy computing!

SOLUTION: Sylvania G and Windows XP timing issues

Thanks to a helpful developer at the ZSNES forum, I’ve found the solution to the VIA C7 platform speed/timing problems with certain programs.

Edit C:\BOOT.INI and add the /usepmtimer switch to the boot command line for Windows XP.  This uses a timer that is stable even when in power management modes, which means that the throttling of the C7 CPU and accompanying chipset do not affect its timing characteristics.  Some applications like ZSNES rely on a very precise and stable timing mechanism (in the case of ZSNES, speed regulation depends on QueryPerformanceCounter) and the normal timer on this platform is unstable in certain power management states.  Also, I used WCPUID’s real-time clock display to figure out that the System control panel (sysdm.cpl) reports the frequency wrong on the C7 and that it is in fact running at 1200 MHz when under a full load, despite Windows’ insistence that somehow my CPU is going as low as 198 MHz when the lowest ACPI P-state is 400 MHz.

Now I can finally finish playing Final Fantasy V. 

Sylvania G’s VIA C7-M versus Windows XP

I changed my Sylvania G (original, non-Meso) netbook to Windows XP/Linux dual-boot to test some software I’m working on, and discovered that while Windows XP certainly does boot and run in general on the G, some kind of system timer or timing loop is severely out of whack!  I wanted to use my little G as a portable gaming machine from the Windows XP install, and to my horror, ZSNES couldn’t decide what speed it wanted to run!  Now, I’ve never had a single issue with ZSNES on any computer I’ve ever tried it on, even preferring the Windows port of it over the Linux native one, and not once has a problem existed with ZSNES that I couldn’t find an easy fix for, until now.

I’ve been researching the matter and gathering evidence, and I may have a potential answer to the problem.  Linux requires activation of the VIA C7 Enhanced PowerSaver module e_powersaver to clock the VIA C7 CPU properly between 400 and 1200 MHz; apparently the default speed of the CPU is only 600 MHz instead of 1200 MHz, because Linux installs without e_powersaver and Windows XP report a ~600 MHz processor where a 1.2 GHz one exists.  Here’s the extremely weird part, though: if I check the System control panel shortly after bootup and read the clock speed, sometimes it registers a clock speed of 198 MHz (about 200 MHz) which isn’t even one of the ACPI P-states for the VIA C7-M 1.2 processor.

I’ve unlocked the Windows HAL options (I’ll post how to do that at another time) and switched between ACPI Multiprocessor PC (the default for the image I used) and ACPI Uniprocessor PC and MPS Uniprocessor PC, all of which use the local APIC for IRQ routing but the MPS variant of which doesn’t theoretically touch ACPI.  Nothing seems to have helped.  I have two working theories as to what’s going on here, and how it might be fixed:

1. A calibration loop in Windows a la BogoMIPS in Linux is being screwed up by the VIA C7, or
2. The VIA C7’s PowerSaver feature is ignored or incorrectly used by Windows (via generic ACPI P-states) and it’s throwing off some kind of timer that ZSNES relies on for proper emulation of the 65816 CPU and SPC audio processor.

So far, I haven’t found a solution to this problem, and Sylvania’s site is extremely unhelpful, with only Windows drivers and a new version of gOS, but no BIOS updates or further information.  I’m looking into the technical stuff on the VIA c7 now, and it looks like the solution (assuming Windows isn’t doing something sinister) lies in clever manipulation of the C7 model-specific registers (MSRs) that control the processor’s power state.  If ZSNES is mis-calibrating some kind of tight internal timing loop because of some kind of CPU clocking issue, then tweaking the MSRs may be the solution to the problem.  Unfortunately, I’m no Windows developer, so I’m not certain how I should approach the problem.  I don’t think it’s isolated to ZSNES either, but I don’t recall what I saw that justifies that belief.  In any case, I’m working on it.  It’s just one of many pesky projects I’m hitting my head against at the moment.  We’re still working on that remote access software package; in fact, someone found our site and called us, and I had to sort of turn her away.  It’s all a bit behind schedule, and there’s not really much I can do to make things proceed any more quickly.  Stay tuned…

Why I love my (original) Sylvania G netbook (and how to fix its “issues” easily)

My Sylvania G netbook.

If the tips in this entry help you, please send me an E-mail message letting me know!  I GREATLY appreciate feedback!)

A lot of professional reviewers out there seem to have nothing but bad comments on the original (non-Meso) Sylvania G netbook.  I bought one of these puppies for $300 and felt like I was getting quite the steal.  Then again, I’m a Linux user, so I feel more “at home” with a Linux laptop (though my primary line of work is obviously fixing all the problems under Microsoft’s OS every day of my life).  I love my Sylvania G.  It’s tiny, light, the battery lasts forever, people look at it and think I’m watching a DVD on a portable DVD player rather than computing, its wireless actually works far better than I expected…the list goes on.  Granted, it lacks some software that I’d like, but for its primary purposes (Internet browsing, light office apps, maybe an MP3 here and there), it does the job beautifully.  I wish it had all the shortcuts to all the control panels available, but they’re not there because the 800×480 WVGA screen can’t handle them vertically; I’ll tell you how to bypass the vertical issue in a minute.

The main reason I’m writing this is not to explain why my G is so awesome, but rather how to make it that way.  The number one complaint about the G is its postage-stamp sized mouse trackpad, and believe it or not, the laptop comes with the tools needed to fix the insane acceleration that it comes with by default (no more “buy a USB mouse if you’re going to buy this laptop” complaints!)  The biggest advantage of the G over the practically identical Everex Cloudbook (which the G is basically a rebranded version of) is that unlike the Cloudbook, with its moronic “mouse buttons on the left side of the unit, mouse trackpad on the right” layout, the G has the touchpad assembly below the keyboard, WITH THE BUTTONS IMMEDIATELY BESIDE THE PAD.  That leaves the excessive tracking speed (where you can just lift your finger off the pad and the mouse moves two inches across the seven-inch LCD) as the only remaining issue, and HERE IS HOW TO FIX THE SYLVANIA G NETBOOK POINTER TRACKING SPEED, STEP BY STEP!

1. Log in.  You need to be at your desktop with nothing open to do what I’m about to tell you!

2. Right-click on the background.  Click on “Create Launcher…”

3. For the name, type something to the effect of “Mouse settings”

4. For the command, type (without quotes) “gnome-mouse-properties”  Click OK.

5. Double-click on your new “Mouse settings” icon.  Fix the Acceleration and Sensitivity sliders to the way you want them.  Acceleration controls how much faster the pointer gets when you move your finger more quickly; Sensitivity is the raw tracking speed of the mouse.  Move them around until you get the pointer going as slow as you want it to be.  (The settings will change immediately as you move the sliders, so you don’t have to worry about the bottom half of the panel being off-screen until you’re done.)

6. While you’re here, you might as well change double-click and drag-and-drop thresholds if you want to do so.

7. You’ll need both hands to perform this stunt…here’s how you can move a window in Linux even if the title bar is off-screen:  hold ALT and you can drag the window by clicking ANYWHERE!  So, put the pointer in the middle of the control panel, hold ALT, then hold the left mouse button too, and finally, move the touchpad UP with any spare finger you can find.

8.  Now, you can click Close, which you couldn’t even see before!

Now that your mouse is fixed, you can use the machine normally!  Whew.

If you’re a Linux user who wants a command prompt, right-click on the desktop background again, “create launcher” and fill the name AND command with the word “xterm” (no quotes).  You’ll get a terminal launcher from which to do the next tricks…

Want access to the “root” account so you don’t have to “sudo” every single command you need to run as root?  Pop open an xterm, type “sudo bash” and enter your password to launch a root shell.  This is fine on a temporary basis, but I went a step further and typed “passwd root” at said root shell and made a root password.  Voila!  Root account access via “su” instead of sudo.

I really REALLY hate the dock at the bottom of the screen, primarily because it hogs up space you desperately need on such a tiny laptop.  Here’s how to make that dock GO AWAY and not load anymore.  The dock is called “wbar” and if you hop into a root shell, you can disable it with these steps (and find out how to turn stuff off that you otherwise might not have known):

1. Open an xterm.  Either “sudo bash” or “su” to get to a root shell, depending on your setup.

2. Type “cd /etc/xdg/autostart”

3. Type “ls” and you’ll see all these little things that automatically start when you log in, like the battery meter and volume control.  Notice “wbar.desktop” in there?  That’s the culprit.

4. Type this and you’ll have effectively disabled that dock at the bottom: “mv wbar.desktop ../autostart.disabled/” (remember that you can hit [tab] in the middle of typing something to have Linux try to complete part or all of what you’re typing.  If it does nothing, type more.)

5. Type “exit” twice and the xterm will close.  Log out and back in, and that pesky dock is GONE.

Did you know that your computer comes with applications that ARE NOT in the list under the gOS menu?  A couple of handy things to put in the “command” part of the “create launcher” box include “gnome-sudoku” and “gnome-sound-recorder” and “gnome-calculator”.  If you get really bored, open an xterm, type “gnome-” and hit [tab] twice.  You’ll see all the GNOME programs that gOS has installed, and you might see some program names that you didn’t expect.  That’s how I found Sudoku, Calculator, and the sound recorder application!

While you’re here, create a launcher for “gedit” on the desktop.  It’s a text editor like Notepad on Windows, and if you need to jot something down fast, it’s much better than waiting for OpenOffice.org Writer to start.

For $300, and with my tips above, the original Sylvania G is an absolute gem.  You simply can’t beat its value unless you drop another $100 on an Acer Aspire One (what I originally wanted but couldn’t justify purchasing.)  Once you slow down the mouse and add some launchers for some helpful applications, the G starts to look far better than it may have on display in the store.  I don’t know about the Meso, but I don’t care, because I’ve found the perfect laptop for my needs and that’s the end of the story!  I absolutely LOVE my G!

Once again, please send me feedback if this helps you out!