Firefox can be fast under FGLRX

Use about:config to set:

gfx.xrender.enabled = false
layers.acceleration.force-enabled = true

Canvas rendering should be much much faster. Remember to set these to defaults if you switch drivers, the same isn’t true on DRI/Gallium Radeon.

Fixing “Wrong principal in request” in Kerberos 5

krb5_newrealm doesn’t seem to add enough lines to /etc/krb5.conf. To fix this, add the following lines to /etc/krb5.conf on all machines participating in the realm. My local realm is LAN, but substitute your own. The new lines will be in bold, the existing lines should already exist, if they don’t, add them.

[realms]
   LAN = {
     kdc = infinity.lan
     admin_server = infinity.lan
     default_domain = lan
   }

[domain_realm]
   .lan = LAN
   lan = LAN

All hosts/servers participating in the realm that offer Kerberized services should have a FQDN that ends in your realm’s domain name (.lan in my case).

Making GTK3 apps try to look more native in XFCE on Debian

XFCE is a GTK2 environment, however a lot can be done to improve GTK3 apps on XFCE.

I prefer to use Clearlooks as my GTK2 theme and use the GNOME icon set. On Debian, apt-get install gnome-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-extras gnome-icon-theme-symbolic clearlooks-phenix-theme and use the XFCE Appearances to change your theme to Clearlooks-Phenix and your icons to GNOME.

If you’re using an XFCE GTK engine theme instead, install gtk3-engines-xfce instead of clearlooks-phenix-theme, and there also is a gtk3-engines-oxygen which provides a native look-alike of KDE4’s Oxygen theme.

You probably should restart your X session after fiddling around with this to fix apps that don’t change themes at runtime properly.

Fixing overly strong LCD sub-pixel filtering on Debian and Ubuntu

Some people think the sub-pixel color fringing is too strong when they have sub-pixel anti-aliasing on. If your install is old enough, you might not have the correct symlinks in /etc/fonts/conf.d. Do…

sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/


… and restart X. This should fix the problem.

How to watch NASA TV on Linux

First, I’d like to say congratulations to NASA on the landing of Curiosity. It was worth every dollar of that $2 billion.

mplayer 'http://nasa-f.akamaihd.net/public_h264_700@54826' happily plays the stream.