For my own sanity I'm blogging this, since every time I have to do it I end up jumping through the same hoops and cursing myself for not blogging it!

I have a USB external drive on one of my machines. I want it shared across the network. It's an old Windows drive formatted as NTFS. Here are the steps:

1. On the "server" install required services and applications. As root:

FUSE should be there already, but just in case. The GUI for ntfs-3g is optional.

2. Make sure the NFS services is enabled and loads on boot:

So, last night I lost not inconsiderable amounts of time and sleep to a Vodafone Italy 3G USB key. Trying to get these things set up is supposed to be fairly straightforward, however the end-to-end process is not really documented anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe for individual devices, but not in any generic way.

Since this is the second time I've done this now, and in both cases it was a pain in the ass, I am documenting some generic steps so I don't forget what I need to do all over again!

Ok, here I am at DrupalCon Paris blogging about Linux. WTF? Sorry, sorry, but I'm blogging this before I forget how I did it.

Note: This is written with Fedora 10 and Gnome. Apparently KDE has a desktop zoom feature which sounds like it achieves the same thing more easily. Although this is Fedora 10, I guess it should work for any Gnome desktop.

If you have a small-screened laptop or netbook (in my case, an EEE PC 901) and you want to "zoom out" your desktop and applications but can't go to a larger screen resolution, what do you do? With Gnome it's a two step process:

Good news for all you people who want to process their own video on their Drupal website. While FFMpeg is a "forbidden" application as far as the Fedora project guys and gals are concerned (not sure why - usually because of some legal issue), the ATrpms repositories contain FFMpeg, the Linux command line video encoding tool you need to install to use the FlashVideo module:
http://atrpms.net/

Specifically, here is the Fedora 10 repository:
http://atrpms.net/dist/f10/

Apache2 on the Fedora core (in my case Fedora 10) can be a fiddly beast. In fact, if you're a total Linux n00b I would say don't bother with the core Apache2 and MySQL - just install XAMPP, which gives you everything right out of the box. It is *not* secure but as long as we're talking about a fire-walled home computer here it is fine.