Arbitrary parameters

With four parameters, I can fit an elephant, and with five, I can make him wiggle his trunk. -- Johnny von Neumann.

wireless in ubuntu

I changed to Ubuntu for no reason. Just want to try something different. It turns out to be a happy (and easy) change. The only thing hit on me was the wireless network. It couldn't "easily" (I mean, with a lot of my help, it could) find hidden wireless access point. But University only give me hidden wireless. A little bit search lead me to the following solution:
install wicd. google wicd will show you everything.

It is simple again. I like it.

Oh, one more thing, ubuntu is an OS and only an OS. It has not many software come with it. If you are a researcher, like me, you need to install (it is easy though) all softwares that you need. A short list for me:

gnuplot
vim (the default one is too basic)
xifg
compiz-fusion (for amusing your windows friends, maybe not anymore with vista)
pdftk
. . .

Difference of "change line mark" between windows and unix

In unix, line ends with a new line charactor, i.e. 0x0a.

In DOS/Windows line ends with a carriage return and new line pair, i.e.
0x0d0a.

In your case, every line ended with a carriage return, i.e. 0x0d, which is
displayed as '^M' in vi.

You need to replace every '^M' to new line in vi with the following command:

:%s/^M/\r/g

Note: ^M is entered as pressing 'v' and 'm' while holding 'Ctrl'.

OR :%s:\r:\r:g

save time on startup in Fedora

Turning off network service can save some time in startup process in Fedora especially laptops.

How-to:
1. go to System -> Administration -> Services
2. turn off 'Network' service on all run levels.
3. DONE.

Next time when you boot up, you will notice the system stop checking network devices like eth0, wlan01 . . . This is good for laptops which frequently check network access points.

ATI driver for Fedora

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503&page=1&pp=10

So far, ati cards are not supported.