Erik’s Weblog

I always forget the settings that get solid results connecting to my CentOS/Fedora systems under Putty. Here’s the whole nine yards, maybe someone else will be able to use ‘em as well.

Get putty from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html. I use the installer.

Get puttycyg from http://web.gccaz.edu/~medgar/puttycyg/. Unpack the .exe files over your putty folder. This will be c:\program files (x86)\Putty if you use the installer on x64 windows. You’ll want to replace the originals.

Drag pageant.exe into your startup folder.

Download bitstream vera from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/

Unpack the zipfile somewhere. Select all the .ttf files, right click, select install.

Start putty (you did make a quicklaunch icon, right?)

* Under keyboard, select ‘Linux’ under ‘The function keys and keypad’
* Under window, set lines of scrollback to something nice, like 10000
* Under appearance, change the font to BitSteam Sans Vera Mono, any size you like. I use 9.
* Under behavior, check ‘full screen on alt-enter’
* Under translaction set character set to UTF-8
* Under colors, adjust ANSI Blue to something like 100,100,255 (it’s too dark to read by default
* Under connection, set seconds between keepalives to 600
* Under connection-data, set terminal-type string to ‘linux’
* Under SSH-Auth, check ‘Allow Agent Forwarding’

Finally… go back to session, click ‘Default Settings’, and ‘Save’.

Edit January 7: See bottom of post.

Every person I’ve talked to with a RAZR seems to have this problem, and nobody has known how to fix it. You know what I’m talking about! You put the phone on ‘vibrate’ and stick it in your pocket, confident that when that important phone call comes in you’ll know. 3 hours pass by and nothing happens, and you pull the phone out of your pocket only to find out that it’s now on ’silent’ and you have 5 missed calls! WTF!

Well, here’s a really easy and 99% functional solution. It’s so simple it pains me that I never poked into the menus far enough to find it, but alas I was too lazy to figure out the default unlock code. As it turns out, you can lock any individual application to use require an unlock code before use. Enabling this feature for the ‘ringtone selection’ application will make it ask for your passcode every time that stupid side button gets pressed in your pocket. Since the phone is closed… no more accidental switches to silent!

On my phone, the default unlock code was 1234. I’ve also read it can be the last four digits of your phone number or 0000, so try all three. To disable the feature, open the phone. Click the center (”menu”?) button. Select Settings. Select 4. Security. Select ‘Lock Application’. At this point it will ask for your unlock code. Bang stuff in here starting with 1234 until you get in. If you can’t, get your provider to fix it for you. Scroll down the list to ‘Ring Styles’ and use the right arrow to change from ‘Unlocked’ to ‘Locked’. Voila!

Bear in mind you will have to enter your unlock code to change the ring style now, even if the phone is open, so it isn’t really the ideal fix. Resetting the unlock code to 0000 makes this just a bit less painful. You can reset your unlock code using the ‘New Passwords’ selection under 4. Security and selecting ‘Unlock Code’.

For those who care, here’s where I found this info [thread about v3c ringstyle lock](http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=843301) and
[thread about v3c unlock codes](http://www.wifi-forum.com/wf/showthread.php?p=377669). As a point of reference, I have an [Alltel](http://www.alltel.com) v3c running bone stock, but supposedly most (all?) RAZR variants are susceptible to this trick.

For those who don’t like keying in the unlock code to change ring styles, I’d love to hear of a way to just allow me to remap those outside buttons to something more useful or nothing at all, but haven’t found anything so far. Prove me wrong!

Edit January 2, 2007:
So I found the fly in the ointment. The problem is that the phone pops up the ‘enter unlock code’ screen whenever you bump a button, and along with it turns on the backlight! and never turns it off! Nice work Motorola =/.

So I had a great idea… Why don’t I buy a DVD burner and then start using DVD’s to install software, make backups, etc, etc. Well… it was a nice idea, but then I had another great idea… Why don’t I run windows XP 64 since I have an AMD Opteron system! Turns out none of the wonderful bundled DVD burning software will even install on XP64, let alone run, so there it sat.

I’d always used the win32 build cdrecord to burn iso images under windows anyway, since the [ISO Recorder Powertoy](http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm) doesn’t work if windows doesn’t have a driver for your CD burner, and I’d been stuck in that situation a few times. I figured cdrecord would work the same for burning DVD’s. Well, aside from the possible licensing issues, at least with my drive, it doesn’t. For reference, my drive is this:

hdd: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3500AG, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

I saw a bunch of documents out on the web saying that cdrecord was able to burn DVD’s, just like a cd image using `cdrecord -dao `. I tried that. Several times. Every DVD was a coaster. Last time I had linux installed, I tried it under linux too, but since it was just a passing fancy I didn’t dig into it.

Well yesterday I committed to running linux on my desktop for a while to get a project finished since I don’t have any other linux development suitable machines available currently. I needed a DVD burned, and when I tried to have Dave burn one for me on his windows machine, it didn’t work either! Something was up! I tried it using the `cdrecord`, and made another coaster. But this time I noticed something:

Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 0
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : '_NEC    '
Identifikation : 'DVD_RW ND-3500AG'
Revision       : '2.18'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.
cdrecord: Found DVD media: using cdr_mdvd.
Using Session At Once (SAO) for DVD mode.
Using Session At Once (SAO) for DVD mode.
Using Session At Once (SAO) for DVD mode.
Using generic SCSI-3/mmc DVD-R(W) driver (mmc_mdvd).
Driver flags   : SWABAUDIO BURNFREE
Supported modes: PACKET SAO
scsi_set_streaming
Speed set to 8467 KB/s
Starting to write CD/DVD at speed   6.0 in dummy SAO mode for single session.

Aha! Theres two types of DVDR media, and I have +R. This is a problem. Well, the cdrecord manpage claims autodetection support for plusr devices and media, but when I tried to force a +R driver…

erik@bambi ~]$ cdrecord  -dao driver=mmc_dvdplus dev=/dev/hdd /tmp/sol-nv-b49-x86-dvd.iso
Illegal driver type 'mmc_dvdplus'.

So therein lies the problem. Well, the good news is that I found the solution. A little bit of googling taught me about a great new program, growisofs (http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/). And it’s even included in FC5, in the dvd+rw-tools package! Well, don’t ask me why I didn’t know this before, but growisofs works like a charm.

[erik@bambi ~]$ growisofs --Z /dev/hdd=/tmp/sol-nv-b49-x86-dvd.iso
Executing 'builtin_dd if=/tmp/sol-nv-b49-x86-dvd.iso of=/dev/hdd obs=32k seek=0'

To boot, it even displays progress information AND my disc was readable finally!

So I’m working on some linux software and am running linux on my desktop. One of my major pet peeves every time I go back to a linux desktop is that out of the box my button 4 and 5 don’t work correctly under firefox. Here’s the fix.

Under Fedora Core 5, use this:

cat > /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh <<-EOF
#!/bin/sh
# /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh
# Required for the configuration of a 5-button mouse
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 8 9 4 5 6 7 10 11"
EOF
chmod a+x /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh

Under CentOS 4 / RHEL4, use this:

cat > /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh <<-EOF "
#!/bin/sh
# /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh
# Required for the configuration of a 5-button mouse
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5 "
EOF
chmod a+x /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/mouse.sh

And then use the following for the mouse inputdevice:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
        Option      "Buttons"   "7"
        Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection