A recent update of the xerver-xorg package (1:7.4+1) changed the way X configures input devices – they are now handled by hal or evdev, and their sections of the xorg.conf are ignored.

I filed a bug report, and was informed that it’s not a bug. I disagree, in that if you break things in an upgrade, it is a bug.

Never-the-less, I had to figure out how to get my EmulateWheel behaviour back since the upgrade.

The evdev man page is nigh on useless, but this blog entry helped a lot.  It has lead to the following as my /etc/hal/fdi/policy/marble_mouse.fdi:

<match key="info.product" string="Logitech USB Trackball">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">8</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxsisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
</match>

I got the info.product part by looking at /dev/input/by-id/, and
guessing. I logged out, and restarted hal for good measure. One or the
other may not be necessary.

I am trying to install MATLAB on a headless Linux server at work, and it is ridiculously miserable. I can’t believe that this is the industry standard. It is no wonder that people are switching to Python, Octave and Maxima. Between free, gratis systems and expensive with horrible installation, there is little to recommend MATLAB.

I had a font I needed to install to make some graphics for a web project. It was easy enough to buy the font – I just chose the option for the TrueType file (TTF) and I knew I’d be fine. I had a little trouble getting the font to show up though, so I record my efforts here.

1. Put the TTF files (there’s usually three) in their own subdirectory of /usr/share/fonts/truetype.
2. As root, run these two commands in the new subdirectory: mkfontscale and mkfontdir
3. Check to see if the font is installed: run xlsfonts and see if your font is there
4. If you don’t see your font, start Googling, but perhaps start here.