Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 December 8

= December 8 =

PLEASE help me find a new Desktop sidebar!
Google pulled an unthinkable Jar-Jar with their products and userbase by DISCONTINUING Google Desktop. It was a perfectly-working desktop application; there was no need to discontinue it.

I still want to see information on the side of my desktop.

Therefore, what other desktop sidebar app is still available (and gets updated as regularly as Google Desktop used to), with a wide widget selection to choose from to add to said sidebar? Thanks for helping me find a suitable replacement. --70.179.174.101 (talk) 08:33, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Why not start here? --Ouro (blah blah) 11:12, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * So this may not be the best answer, however start menu search in Windows 7 actually work fine. (assuming you are looking for desktop files). And when you need to search the web, a web browser can quickly do that for you. General Rommel (talk) 10:07, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Aztec code reder for computer
Does anyone know, if there is program for Windows/Linux that can read Aztec barcodes? I know there are many mobile phone programs that can do that, but I do not have smartphone, so I can´t use them. --91.156.175.33 (talk) 15:16, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * The usually handy libzbar doesn't decode Aztec Code yet (there's an open feature request), but Zebra Crossing (ZXing) does (they say Aztec decoding is at an alpha level).  I tried the sample on the Wikipedia article on their online demo and it decoded that fine. A slight downside is that while libzbar and zbar-tools are commonly packaged for linux distributions, you may have to build ZXing yourself (it's in Java). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:56, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Editor vi changed somehow... how do I change it back?
I've been using vi on my Ubuntu (10.04 LTS?) system at work for many months now. Even though I hate vi as an editor, I use it because it is ubiquitous across *nix platforms. Sometime in the last couple of weeks, the behaviour on Ubuntu has changed in a most annoying way: When in insert mode, I used to be able to use the arrow keys to steer round the file to wherever I wanted to enter text. However, since the change, the arrow keys now drop uppercase "A", "B", "C" or "D" on a new line in the file. This leads to much frustration as I exit insert mode, and enter "dd" repeatedly to get rid of these extra lines. I strongly suspect one of the last two system updates did something. What happened and how do I change vi's behaviour back to how it was? Astronaut (talk) 15:22, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * There are multiple possible problems. Instead of attempting to retype all of them here, this page popped up as having both set term and nocompatible "fixes" that I suspect will fix your problem. Hopefully it helps. -- k a i n a w &trade; 15:36, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. The supplied link, led to other pages on the same site which suggested a fix. It also hinted at a bug in newer versions of Vim. I created a .vimrc file containing set nocompatible and the problem is now fixed. Astronaut (talk) 12:31, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Wireless USB adapter in Linux
I'm trying to install a wireless USB adapter under Linux. The device is connected (checked with lsusb), the driver is installed (with ndiswrapper, the hardware is recognized), but I don' t manage to connect through this adapter. The output of iwconfig is just lo, eth0, eth1 (like before). I expected to see something like wlan0 after executing iwconfig. What am I missing? 88.8.76.138 (talk) 16:19, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * What distro are you using? As far as I was aware ndiswrapper was now essentially obsolete. IRWolfie- (talk) 16:47, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm using Ubuntu 9.x. ndiswrapper might be obsolete, but it managed to install the driver and recognize the device as present (ndiswrapper -l outputs netathur : driver installed device (0CF3:9271) present). (BTW, lsusb output is Bus 004 Device 004: ID 0cf3:9271 Atheros Communications, Inc.).

88.8.76.138 (talk) 16:55, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * What does "ifconfig wlan0" report? ifconfig doesn't always report unconfigured network interfaces. Is it listed in /dev/.udev/db   ?  CS Miller (talk) 18:32, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I get "wlan0: error fetching interface information: Device not found" from ifconfig wlan0. and there's an x2fdevices/x2fvirtual/x2fmisc/x2fndiswrapper link (broken) in dev/.udev/db, when I connect and disconnect the dongle. 88.8.76.138 (talk) 20:20, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * When you want a list of interfaces from ifconfig including the ones that haven't been upped, that's what the -a flag is for. 68.60.252.82 (talk) 22:13, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Check with http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Devices/USB a lot of people use ndiswrapper despite there being a proper native driver because all they find initially are old howtos. ¦ Reisio (talk) 21:53, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

android
please, can a smart 7' android 2.2, work as a computer — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.206.13.3 (talk) 19:34, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's a computer. As for doing the particular thing you want it to do, it depends on what particular thing.  Jim.henderson (talk) 20:48, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * For some people "work as a computer" means "run all my Windows software." Android is not Windows. It is not Mac. It is Android. If the application you want to run is available for Android, you can run it on your Android computer. -- k a i n a w &trade; 00:59, 9 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you mean 7" not 7'? --Colapeninsula (talk) 10:03, 9 December 2011 (UTC)