Joe Fleming dot net

A while back I picked up an ECS 945GCD-M motherboard to replace my dead VIA board that was running my RAID server. The board is pretty nice, sitting there completely silent, running 64-bit Ubuntu and packing far more power than the board it was replacing. But it has one glaring problem; the network card on the thing didn’t work out of the box in Linux. I had been running a cheap USB network card I had laying around, but it was slow and I hated that I couldn’t get it working. So, I set out to make the onboard Atheros AR8131M chipset work.

Google will give you a plethora of guides for compiling the drivers (this one is probably the best), but I just couldn’t get things to load. It was also never clear what version of the drivers I should be trying to run. Most tutorials made reference to 1.0.0.9, some to 1.0.0.10, but the current version (at the time of this writing) is 1.0.1.9. In the end, though, that’s the version I did manage to get working. Here’s how I did it:

I’m a fan of Ubuntu, and I’m kind of lazy about setting up my desktop, which means I’m using Gnome as my window manager. Over the years I’ve grown to like it… it’s not perfect, but it’s livable and works pretty well. One of the problems I’ve always had with it, though, is all of the window elements in it are huge. This makes it look kind of childish and eats up a lot of screen real estate on the 1280×800 display on my desktop. I couldn’t even imaging running it on a lower resolution!

I was discussing this with my friend Jason and he recommended playing with the font sizes. Sure enough, that did the trick! It seems that the reason everything is so big is that the default font sizes are 10pt. I shrank them down and MAN does it look nice now!

You can edit these values one ways; via gconf-editor or via gconftool-2 on the command line. I won’t post the gconf-editor direction since, if you know your way around it, you can extrapolate the parts you want to edit via the gconftool-2 commands. The following settings worked extremely well for me, but you can adjust the font faces and sizes as you see fit.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font "Sans Bold 8"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name "Sans 9"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name "Monospace 9"

This will adjust the title bar, all normal window text and all monospace text, respectively. Again, these numbers looked the best to me, but you can make them even smaller (or bigger) to fit your needs. I did these adjustments on my 1680×1050 display as well, and it looks amazing. Then again, I love small text!

I recently came across a problem where serving a file to Internet Explorer would result in the following error message.

This affected IE6, IE7 and IE8 in my testing. The way I was serving the file was through PHP via readfile. Before sending the contents of the file, I was, of course, setting some header parameters so that the browser would handle the file and the user wouldn’t just see some binary garbage on their screen. In my case, I was serving a PDF file that was being generated server-side and sent to the client. The basic header parameters are as follows:

// We'll be outputting a PDF
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
// It will be called your_file.pdf
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="your_file.pdf"');
// declare Files Size here (for the sake of peoples sanity, please add this
header('Content-Length: '.filesize($filename));

This works just fine in most situations, but once you introduce a secure connection, IE fails with the above error. Of course, like most IE problems, this doesn’t happen in any other browser. Ugh.