Remove "Computer", "Home", "Trash" icons from Debian 5 desktop, gnome

In terminal, type "gconf-editor". This bring out the GNOME configuration editor.

Go to "apps->nautilus->desktop", uncheck the "computer_icon_visible", "home_icon_visible", "trash_icon_visible" checkboxes.

That's it.

debian中fcitx在en_US locale下自动启动

在新装的debian系统里，中文输入法我原本装的是scim。

不过有个问题挺让人苦恼的。系统默认locale是中文-中国的时候，scim会随着我登录系统而自动启动；而我用en_US的locale登录的时候，scim就不会自动出来。这是个问题，因为我习惯英文的系统，而又要用到中文输入法！

在网上搜索、研究了好长时间，对于问题的解决并没有什么实质性的进展。不过看到了另外一个输入法──fcitx，free chinese input toy for x。网上的议论好多人都说它比scim好用而且从它们主页的比较也可以看出一些东西来──scim的site实在是太简陋了，documentatio也太简单，相比较而言fcitx要好一些。因而，我打定主意换fcitx。

原本在fcitx官网看到最新版本是3.6,可是下载下来compile时用“./configure”总是出来个“no such file or directory”，搞不懂怎么回事，我也就不麻烦了，直接在新力得装了个早一点的版本，3.4.

不过，fcitx还是有和scim同样的问题，在en_US下它不会自动启动。转了一圈我又回到了起点了呵呵。不过，这次运气比较不错，在这篇博文找到了解决方案。

首先在/etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/下新建一个文件en_US，内容如下：
XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"
XIM=fcitx
XIM_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/fcitx
XIM_ARGS=""
GTK_IM_MODULE=XIM
QT_IM_MODULE=XIM
DEPENDS="fcitx"

然后编辑/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodule-files.d/libgtk2.0-0.immodules文件，找到"xim" "X Input Method" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "ko:ja:th:zh"，将之改成"xim" "X Input Method" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "en:ko:ja:th:zh"。

通过上面两步，成了。现在locale是en_US情况下fcitx照样可以自动启动。下面是screenshot.

Western Digital Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive in Debian 5.0

I installed Debian 5.0 last night. When I tried to copy my music and pictures from my Western Digital Essential Edition 1 TB External Hard Drive to the newly installed machine, it failed me.

The "My Book" name did show at the left tree panel of the file browser. But when I clicked on it, a dialog window prompted up showing that the mounting failed because of invalid parameter.

The external drive's lights were on. But as they were not blinking, I knew that Debian was not reading the external disk. Whatever, I was not sure about the reason of the failure. At first I thought maybe debian didn't support external usb disk as large as 1 TB. Then I searched on line, but got little userful information. Thinking the guide came with the disk may help a little, I took out the disk's package box. To my surprise, I found "Compatibility: Windows Vista/XP/2000; Mac OS X 10.3+" on the box. Debian was not supported, and I never noticed this before!

However, there is always hope. When I just was hesitating whether to switch back to Windows or not, I found this post "Mounting an NTFS drive in Debian". Following the instruction I installed two packages libfuse2 and ntfs-3g with the following commands executed in the terminal.

apt-get install libfuse2
apt-get install ntfs-3g

Guess what, it worked. Now "My Book" was mounted successfully. After all, the problem lied on the two packages.