Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I have an MP3 that I want to put on CD. K3B has a plug-in to do this called k3b-mp3, but it’s not in the standard distribution for Fedora 8. A poster said it’s available from the Livna Repository. I download the repository RPM only to find out I already had it installed. Now I wonder why it’s not showing up in the package manager. Browse RPM Find to look at package contents and see that k3b-mp3 is in the k3b-extras-nonfree package. Installing this package will also install K3B if it’s not already there.

Although mplayer worked fine, I couldn’t click on videos or music files in Nautilus because it runs gmplayer and gmplayer flashed a dialog box over and over too fast to see. I ran gmplayer on an MP3 file at the command line and got this message over and over:
[AO_ALSA] Unable to find simple control 'PCM',0.
A google of this turned up a solution:

Change Preferences/Audio driver to Pulse (from Alsa)

Sometime within the last few Fedora upgrades, Emacs changed. Before, the file you asked for was the file you got. Then, someone got the bright idea to put a help screen up first, forcing you to enter Ctrl-L before you could get to work. Being a long-time Emacs user, I hated this. But I couldn’t find out how to get rid of it. Until I found this page that has the magic incantation to add to ~/.emacs

(setq inhibit-startup-message t) ; Don't want any startup message

Yay!

The GDM greeter in Fedora 8 has an option to suspend to RAM, but not one for hibernate (suspend to disk). I edited /etc/gdm/custom.conf to add a custom command that runs /usr/bin/pm-hibernate. To see the custom commands from the GDM greeter, you have to press F10. Selecting the command didn’t work–the greeter screen started again. The fix is to set CustomCommandNoRestart0=true.