Mageia 2 on Macbook Pro: how to enable brightness keys with nvidia driver

Here's how to make brightness keys (eg. F1 and F2) to work on Mageia 2 on Gnome 3.

Add this line to the Device section of the xorg.conf (after you configured the proprietary drivers under Mageia control center):

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

Here's the page that helped me.

Edit: note that this configuration may lead to X11 crashes as well as the same configuration with noveau (which does not need any Option in x.org.conf).

Mageia 2

It's out. It's amazing. It works on the macbook pro. Enough said.

Go update or install NOW!.

Fixin a form PDF saved with Mac OSX Preview

Working with tax forms, this year I found the form as an editable PDF.
Unfortunately I had the bad idea of editing e saving it with preview, rendering t unusable with Adobe Reader, which I had to use to print with a windows machine.

Google came to my rescue.
http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/885/cpsid_88564.html

So this is what I have done:

• I installed the javascript in my linux box (in ~/.adobe/Acrobat/version/JavaScripts)
• This as per the documentation add a new option to the file menu, so you have to open the file which does not display the edited items and use " Fix Field Appearances"
• Now you can't save the PDF, but you can print it to a PS file
• run ps2pdf on the ps file and enjoy your pdf ready to be transferred to your windows box.
• Profit... :)

Fixing click to focus problem on Gimp-X11 on MacOS X

If you try to use gimp on MacOS X, you'll find that all the clicks in the tool window needs to be repeated twice, once to select the window and once to select the tool.

If you don't like this beaviour, I stealed from this site the solution:

1. Open a terminal
2. Write

defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

3. Restart X11 if you have it open
4. Enjoy

Come utilizzare Time Machine su share Samba (non supportato)

Eccomi con la versione italiana del mini-howto. È probabile che aggiunga degli screenshot non appena rimetto le mani sul MacBookPro.

Ieri mi sono cimentato nel convincere TimeMachine a utilizzare una share di rete samba come disco di backup, dato che ho completato la configurazione del mio MSI Wind Box con dual Atom.

Così, dopo un po' di prove, controprove, smanettamenti e ricerche su Google, ho trovato questo post sul forum di macrumors, che mi ha fatto risolvere tutti i problemi.

ATTENZIONE: Questa modalità d'uso di TimeMachine non è supportata da Apple, quindi usatela a vostro rischio... eccetera.

Richiede l'uso del terminale.

Using (unsupported) SMB shares for Time Machine

Yesterday, after setting up my Samba NAS based on a dual-Atom MSI Wind Box, I fought against Time Machine, which refuses to use a shared folder as a backup disk.

So after a long struggle, I found this forum post which make everything work.

DISCLAIMER: this use of Time Machine will be unsupported by Apple, so use it at your own risk, warranty is void, and so on.

Terminal access is required.