TuxTips

/proc is often considered one of the most mysterious parts of the linux file system.  For those comming from the windows world especially, but also those who have been using Linux for years, proc seems an at times incomprehensible web of mysterious files and directories.

Understanding the mysteries of /proc can greatly aid in administrering and programming on linux systems, because proc is itself a key into the depths of the system.  In some ways, proc can be thought of as similar to the windows registry; it contains specific files that contain information about the system, and control how the system operates.

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A few days ago I decided to start learning Japanese. I expected to have a difficult path ahead of me, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language for westerners to learn. After running up to my local bookstore, and picking up several books and CDs on the Japanese language, and getting the Adobe Shockwave plugin installed using Crossover Office (A great version of wine, I definitely recommend it if you find the vanilla wine to be too cumbersome); and making myself slightly poorer buy getting a subscription to the online version of Rosetta Stone I found myself facing a difficulty that I hadn’t originally expected. My English version of Slackware with Dropline Gnome and a US keyboard layout allowed me no easy way to insert Japanese script into documents. This meant that I would have difficult learning to read and write Japanese, as well as practicing Japanese by talking with my Japanese speaking friends online.
Knowing that there had to be a solution to this problem, I set out on the internet to find out. Unfortunately, the general (and reasonable) assumption is that if you want to be able to input Japanese characters, you probably read Japanese. For someone just learning the language, I found a lot of the documentation rather incomprehensable. With some effort I figured out how to get everything working, and have here a guide that should help others who want to enable Japanese character input.
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One of the great benefits of Linux is it’s extensibility. For Gnome users, one of the great ways that you can easy expand and customize your desktop is with Nautilus scripts. In this article I discuss using Nautilus scripts to enhance your Gnome experience, as well as providing a couple of starter scripts.
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I thought that today, rather than going for an in-depth tutorial, I would post a useful snippet of code for anyone out there doing GUI development with GTK+. Although Gtk+ is a nice toolkit, one thing that I found that it was lacking was a nice widget to automatically display directories. I had hoped that since it had such a nice file open dialog, there might be something out there, but alas I was unable to find anything. So, I present here a useful function to automatically populate a GtkTreeView with a directory structure.
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