XFCE4 - Where the hell did my power options go?!

So the xfce4 have decided to rewrite the way to logout box appears. Thats perfectly fine and I can't fault that, but making it stupidly impossible to find how to get back to the original behaviour? This I don't like.


So you want your old popup box which gives you those 3, 4 or 5 options that you used to have?

1.  Remove all your old power button things from your taskbar, they are annoying and confusing all at once.
2. Add a new "Action button"
3. You want to enable ONLY the "Logout..." Change this by right clicking the button and turning the options on or off. - *Note* this is different from "Logout".
4.  In Settings -> Session and Start up, you want to enable "Prompt on Logout"
5. Finally, right click on the action button again and change the Apperance to "Action Buttons".

I was discussing this with a nice dev online at the time, and I the trouble I had setting this up, while him believing it was "just a simple change" shows that disconnection between users and devs. When they have that inner knowledge of the system, simple changes to them can have massive results for end users.

Start up multiple screen sessions running the same command

So a hosting company called fortuneCity were shutting down and someone had asked me to assist in backing up "Everything" from them to archive before they finally shut down.

They already was a set of scripts to pull the data down and to back it up elsewhere, but if you wanted to run more than one instance at a time you'd need to start each one manually.

This is silly if you know bash ;)

for I in {1..9}; do screen -d -m -S fortunecity$I ./seesaw.sh Smiley; done


Tada! Starts up 1 - 9 named sessions of screen running the command seesaw.sh :)

Where has root gone?

You may of noticed you can no longer check which physical drive root is mounted on via "mount"

tim.bowers@localhost ~ $ mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext3 (rw,noatime,errors=continue,barrier=0,data=writeback)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)

Herpa derpa!

So.... how do we now check where / is mounted? We could check fstab....

cat /etc/fstab

 ...some stuff...

/dev/sda3        /        ext3        noatime        0 1

But I'm not sure /etc/fstab is always readable.... another way is :

tim.bowers@localhost ~ $  ls -ilah /dev/root
1744 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Oct 21 08:50 /dev/root -> sda3

Enjoy!

Firefox changing h in address bar into w

In one of the most stupid changes ever firefox devs decided that the http:// prefix shouldn't exist, and so you shouldn't be able to type it either.

In firefox 7 if you type a h into the address bar, it presumes you don't understand you don't need the http:// prefix and instead changes your h into a w, as if you were about to type "www".... Now, I'm not even going to go into why this is broken as you need a seperate DNS record (or catch all) for the www. prefix anyway....

To turn it off this stupid behaviour :

about:config
search for 'browser.urlbar.trimURLs'
Change to false.

Done.

Note: You MAY want to see the http prefix, because if its http and not https as you were expecting, this is the first sign something may of gone wrong.