Download Vista wallpapers from Microsoft contest

Microsoft recently conducted a vista wallpaper designing contest in Singapore. You can download all those winning wallpapers from here.

Preventing Autorun in Windows

You can temporary disable autorun in Windows by holding down the shift key while inserting CDs or plugging in USB pendrives.

This is useful in prevention of virus spreading through autorun CDs and USB pendrives.

Opening .chm files in Linux

Chm is a compiled html file mainly used for displaying help. It is a Microsoft format. .chm files can be opened in Linux by using gnochm, kchmviewer or even with outdated xchm.

To install gnochm or kchmviewer use

#apt-get insatll gnochm
#apt-get install kchmviewer

To view .chm files using this
$gnochm file

$kchmviewer file

Install Packages using smart

Debian users have their favourite package manager apt-get and its graphical counter part synaptic download manager. RPM based system users have only limited options. Even though yum is good it is not as good as apt-get from my experience. I am using OpenSuse 10.2 and i found out a new package manager called smart. It is included in the suse 10.2 dvd.

Install smart and smart-gui packages

To run smart

$smart

To get its gui started use

$smart --gui

It supports parallel downloads. Resumes downloads. It stores the downloaded files in /var/lib/smart/packages

For more info click here

Create autoyast file automatically in Suse Linux

Autoyast in Suse is a feature similar to kick start in fedora linux. It is used for automatic deployment otherwise called unattended installation.

Install Suse in one system in the final installation screen click on the button named clone this system for autoyast. The autoyast file with settings for that system is generated and placed in the home directory of root.

Track logins using last and who in Linux

last command displays the deatils of the last login sessions, users,time,date etc.
eg: $last

for specifying the number of entries one can use

$last -n5

To show five entries.

who shows the currently logged in users in the computer

$who

Wget Limitation

There is a limitation for wget prior to version 1.10. The maximum file size possible is 2.0GB. So downloading large DVD images with wget prior to version 1.10 causes error with a small erroreous file download.

All new distros have new version of wget

Speed-Up Windows Vista's Start Menu Search

When you perform a search using the search box in the start panel, Windows Vista automatically searches the file index as well. The file index can be quite large because it includes all the files on your hard drive. One way to speed-up searching in your Start Menu applications is to narrow the scope of the search so that it does not include files on the hard drive:

Method 1: Registry Hack
1. Open registry editor using regedit.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer and select Advanced.
3. Find and right-click on Start_SearchFiles and select Modify.
4. Set the Value to 0.
5. Restart the Explorer.exe process or reboot the computer.

Method 2: Start Button
1. Right-click on the Start Button and select Properties.
2. Click on the Customize button.
3. Uncheck Search Communications.
4. Set Search Files to Don't Search for files.
5. Click OK.