Since the advent of GTK2 I hadn't really bothered with this old, seemingly outdated, beast called GTK 1. However, there are some useful applications which are linked against it and I'd like to use them. Most prominently, it's the Lazarus IDE (the GTK2 interface is buggy and the Qt interface requires tons of hacks to work). The most proinent problem I just couldn't stand is that the default font used in GTK1 apps looks ugly, so ugly it hurts my eyes and renders GTK1 applications unusuable. Fortunately, changing the default font is almost easy; you do have to edit some configuration files.

One of the most useful  extensions to PHP is suPHP which allows any PHP script to be executed under its owning user privileges. This helps in administering sites which need write access to their files (like, for example, Joomla! does for its tmp and log directories) without the need for an FTP layer or potentially dangerous permissions tweaking. Let's see how you can implement this functionality on a home brew server based on Mandriva Linux 2008.1

It's been a long time since ntfs-3g has been the de facto NTFS driver option for leading Linux distributions. This allows for very convenient interoperability with a variety of external storage media with great capacities, like external hard disk drives. One of the problems I faced during the last year of using it, is that when I used KDE's automount feature (actually, the media:/ kioslave) I got boxes in the filenames instead of Greek or other national characters. The solution turned out to be simple in concept, yet obscure in application.