Little hacks & fixes

Little hacks, tricks & fixes

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. Backup your data. I may be wrong, totally wrong or just plain ignorant.

Problem: Sawfish window manager crashes under Gnome in RH 7.3 whenever you try to launch its configuration tool.
Solution: Get the source off of http://sawmill.sourceforge.net. In the file server.c find the function server_accept_connection:
```
static void
server_accept_connection(int unused_fd)
{
    int confd = accept(socket_fd, NULL, NULL);
...
```
That appeared to be where the crash in sawfish was occuring, although "man 2 accept" apparently permitted this usage of accept. Curiously, providing a dummy struct sockaddr as below completely fixed my crashing problems:
```
static void
server_accept_connection(int unused_fd)
{
    int confd;
    struct sockaddr sa;
    int sa_len = sizeof(sa);


    confd = accept(socket_fd, &sa, &sa_len );
...
```
Compile, force uninstall of the sawfish RPM package and install your new sawfish compiled from changed source.
Problem: Xemacs does not load .emacs file under RH 7.2--7.3 or otherwise behaves weirdly on startup.
Solution: There are two places of interest in the xemacs startup sequence that I sometimes find to cause problems:
1. The contents of /usr/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/lisp/site-start.d directory. Whatever is in there get loaded into xemacs on startup. If one of these packages contains an error or misbehaves on your system, your startup may fail. Remove packages you don't need from that directory.
2. File /usr/share/xemacs-21.4.6/lisp/site-start.el or wherever site-start.el is on your system ("locate" is your friend). If you cannot make your ~/.emacs load for love or money, put (load-file "~/.emacs") in this file.
Go to http://www.emacswiki.org/ for lots of useful emacs info. Not all of it applies to xemacs -- check http://www.xemacs.org/
Problem: Netgear FA 311 Fast Ethernet card comes up with different MAC addresses on each boot (as reported by "ifconfig"). Moreover, if you have 2 such cards, they come up with the same (but random) MAC.
Solution: Look at the source code of the LKM driver (fa311.c) supplied with the card. Search for "read_mac", you will see that if the driver fails to read the MAC off of the card's registers, it sets the MAC itself, as follows: the first three bytes are fixed vendor code, the remaining three bytes are chosen at random based on kernel time (jiffies)! Wow. Pick your own last 3 bytes and hard-code them.
If you have two cards, it gets more interesting. You will notice that a variable nearby holds the card's irq. Now your 2 cards will have different irqs, so pick two MAC addresses you like and hard-code them based on current irq :-)
Problem:
Solution: