This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux

Mon Sep 19 16:26:55 PDT 2005

So work issued me one of those "Great Quality" laptops from Fry's, and
informed me that I was expected to be able to boot whatever Microsoft
thing was on it, as well as "Linux" (note that which distribution wasn't
specified at this point).

After rather a struggle, I managed to do that, as well as reserve enough
space to also be able to boot FreeBSD 5-STABLE.  (I figured that this
way, I'd at least have a known reference.)

The flavor of M$ stuff is "Windows XP Home Edition;" since it's not
relevant to what I was planning on mentioning, I won't discuss it
further in this note.

The flavor of "Linux" I chose was "Fedora Core 3."  This turns out to
have been fortuitous, since that just happens to be the flavor that the
Linux-folk back in NJ had decided on.  There is apparently some
discussion about "Fedora Core 4," but they're unwilling to do that yet.
Whatever; I got lucky.  :-}  (There's a first time for everything that
happens.)

So Fedora appears to default to useing the Gnome environment.

Ummm....

I'm used to xdm, and as a window manager, I use a slight variation on
tvtwm called "piewm".  It looks just like ancient, crufty twm, except it
has a little miniature "virtual desktop" in the lower right-hand corner.
I normally use a 3x3 array, so I have 9 virtual screens.  I have a
tendency to clutter them, too.  (For reference, I started using tvtwm on
my Sun 3/60 about a dozen years ago.  I do not tend to be a big fan of
using newer, fancier software merely because it's newer & fancier -- or
even just because it consumes more resources.)

In any case, I have, for some years, had things set up with xdm so that
my ~/.xsession would invoke ssh-add before doing anything else, thus
making my most common use of my laptop very convenient:  I effectively
have "single signon" for large numbers of machines.  Since it's my
laptop's keyboard, mouse, & display that I nearly always use to access
other machines, this is quite handy.

I thought it might be a reasonably Good Thing to see if I could set up
similar functionality with Gnome.

This may not bequite as straightforward as I had thought:  I found a PR
in which a respondent alluded to the difficulty of invoking ssh-add in a
useful way from a Gnome environment -- but did not provide any pointers
on how to accomplish it.

So I started poking around under "Preferences."  Hmmm... "Deskyop
Wallpaper" -- obviously unrelated to ssh-add, but surely changing it
won't hurt anything.  It had been the one cleverly named "Default," so
after looking over the available selections, I tried "Earth from Space,"
which was kinda cool.

But something about that image bugged me.  [Rick, I can hear you
laughing about now....]

I am possessed of the fantasy that I am somewhat familiar with
geography.  And I did not (quite) recognize the depicted land masses...
except that it kinda looked as if it showed a mirror-image of part of
North & Central America ... upside-down and mirror-imaged.

I finally decided to actually look at a map of Baja California....

I was right:  it *is* North & Central AMerica, upside down (north near
the bottom of the screen) and mirror-imaged.

I think that's perverse.

Hmmph...!

Peace (anyway),
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Prediction is difficult, especially if it involves the future. -- Niels Bohr

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key.