Projector

Today I gave my first "high-tech" talk. The projector supported only 640x480. The solution that worked was: start nvidia-settings, make it detect the second display, use clone mode, change the resolution of the main screen to 640x480 and open acroread in full-screen mode.

firefox+acroread: 64bit caveats

At some point, I noticed that acroread plugin (for acrodead 8.1.2) works extremely slowly; moreover, keyboard input did not work at all (I could not scroll down using the keys or search in the document; given that I use this plugin quite a lot to read papers and preprints, that was a serious drawback). Since many plugins are not available in a 64bit version, I use the i386 version of firefox (removed x86_64 version altogether). The culprit turned out to be nspluginwrapper. I simply removed it, and now acroread plugin works just fine.

vpnclient

The latest Cisco vpnclient (4.8.01.0640-k9) does not compile on Fedora 8, even though
the tarball has x86_64 in its name. This patch does the job for the kernel 2.6.23; for the kernel 2.6.24 one has to apply another patch (written by Alexander Griesser).

Of course, one can always use vpnc. I prefer the Cisco client for the simple reason that our computing center people only "support" it.