Recent versions of Linux and the Xorg X-Windows system have been engineered to require very little configuration settings to properly detect graphics options and display resolutions. In most cases graphics should “just work”. The Xorg system stores all its configuration options in the file: xorg.conf. Many distributions including Fedora and CentOS keep this file in the /etc/X11/ directory. In the past this file would contain a great deal of information that was not easy to setup.

As I mentioned previously, I run many sites on my web server. Yesterday I decided to clean up some sites that their owners had neglected or not used. One such site was running Apache Tomcat Java Server, which I did not care to leave running. Now I, like many users of commercial hosting plans, pay for cPanel/WHM which includes a myriad of options/configurations/settings to do almost everything on the server. Back in 2007, I had used the cPanel Addon to install Tomcat.

When I built my server, I only used a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combination drive. Whenever I remotely downloaded a ISO using wget or bittorrent, I would have to copy the 2-4GB file(s) from my server to either my desktop or laptop. I finally caved, and bought a DVD-RW drive for my server (even though it will get minimal usage). (This was all on my CentOS 5 server, I executed these commands entirely remotely.

I spend way too much time and effort tweaking my SpamAssassin settings on my server just so I can get my email and spam situation manageable. Anyways, I’m getting sick of the trouble so I am trying out Google Apps for Domains. This allows me to use my own domain name, but using Gmail for email and other Google web based applications (such as “Docs” and “Calendar”) all for free. It is basically the whole set of Google applications made to work from your own domain.

If you are using Xine from RPMFusion and experiencing crashing immediately after loading in Fedora 10, it is probably due to this bug. Quick work-around is to use Alsa instead of PulseAudio. Open a shell and launch Xine as follows: [mirandam@phoebe ~]$ xine -A alsa To make this setting stick, do the following: Right-Click in the Xine window > Settings > Setup…. In the gui tab, change the Configuration experience level to Advanced, then hit Apply at the bottom of the window.