[Wed Mar 27 16:49:05 CDT 2013]

After I recently switched to running Openbox, instead of GNOME, as my default window manager on my Debian laptop, I was constantly annoyed by the system bell killing my eardrums (not to speak of interrupting the music I listen to) all the time. So, I started searching for possible ways to get rid of it, just to discover that plenty of other people ran into precisely the very same issue. Yet, none of the solutions seemed to work. The one people seemed to favor (judging from the web forums) was to blacklist the pcspkr kernel module. However, in my case, that module was not even loaded. I also tried adding both xset b off and xset b 0 0 0 to my autostart.sh file, but it didn't help. So, what worked in the end was to add the following to my ~/.bashrc file:

if [ -n "$DISPLAY" ]; then
  xset b off
fi

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[Wed Mar 20 15:50:43 CDT 2013]

Here is another little issue I ran into while running Openbox with fbpanel on my Debian laptop: by default, there is no applet to access bluetooth devices. This one is quite easy to fix. Just run the following command from the terminal:

$ bluetooth-applet

Of course, to make sure it is always there by default, also add it to your .config/openbox/autostart.sh file. {link to this entry}

[Wed Mar 20 15:41:05 CDT 2013]

Now, how often did the little locking tab on your ethernet cable break? All the time, right? It just gets caught in whatever you are wearing or a piece of furniture here or there and... it snaps! And, of course, once it does, there is no way to go back. So, what do you do now? Well, I took inspiration in this article from instructables.com titled Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug, gave it a try and... it truly works! Well, my approach is even more haphazard and ugly-looking but... hey, it works!

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[Sun Mar 17 14:30:01 CDT 2013]

OK. Here is an issue I just ran into. Every few months I like to change my default window manager (I normally use GNOME most of the time) as a way to dislodge old habits. So, I recently went back to Openbox (which, incidentally, runs much faster and uses far less memory... no surprise there). However, I ran into an issue when trying to lock my display. As it turned out, there is no xlockmore package on Debian Squeeze anymore. So, what to do? It's quite easy, actually. Just run Obmenu from the Openbox menu, and create a new entry for the following command:

xscreensaver-command -lock

Sure, you will need to make sure the xscreensaver package is also installed and running. So, before you use that menu entry, simply run the following command from the terminal:

# xscreensaver 

It would also be a good idea to include the xscreensaver command in your own autostart.sh configuration file, of course. That way you won't have to run the command manually anymore. {link to this entry}