I was surprised that iptables modules are not loaded automatically on ArchLinux. Here’s how you load them. Dump the following lines in any file (for eg. netfilter.conf) under modules-load.d and restart your machine. Alternatively load the modules manually if you want to avoid restarting.

@~ 1028$ cat /etc/modules-load.d/netfilter.conf 
x_tables
ip_tables
iptable_filter
iptable_mangle
nf_conntrack
nf_defrag_ipv4
nf_conntrack_ipv4
nf_nat
iptable_nat

I have been using a MacBook Pro at work for the past 6 months. I’m not a huge fan of either the MacBook or Mac OS X. OS X according to me is highly bloated and a very poor unix platform. Try entering a command line option at the end of a command – For eg. ls * -l. Applications are installed in their individual directories and are almost never in the path when one needs to execute them from the command line. However one of the features that I grew to love about MacBook is the multi-touch trackpad, especially the two-finger scrolling. Having shifted to Arch Linux for the past month or so, I had been missing the two-finger scrolling. The trackpad that comes with my Lenovo Thinkpad recognizes multi-touch gestures. So I decided to look up how to get two finger scrolling to work and it was surprisingly simple.Continue reading

I just added a package on AUR which enables using Picasa as a Photo Viewer. Got the inspiration from here.

If you already have yaourt installed, then installing the application is a breeze.


yaourt -S picasa-photo-viewer

Sample installation log is shown in the following screenshot

Ubuntu Tweak is a good utility to change the default photo viewer to Picasa, looking for a ‘PicasaPhotoViewer’ application in the list.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog posts, I have started using Unity on Arch Linux. However the packages that are hosted at http://unity.xe-xe.org/ haven’t been updated in a while and has resulted in some conflicts with the updates coming through the main repositories. I have written an email to the person who’s managing the repo, but decided to build my own packages as well. This is how I setup a pristine chroot environment to build the Unity PKGBUILDS created by Xiao-Long Chen. I’m not sure if its the prescribed way to do it, but it works!Continue reading

The WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast is a wonderful plugin for all practical purposes. However its got a minor glitch (or feature – depends on how you perceive it) that it adds extra columns to all post listings. Removing them is easy, but not many people venture into that part of WordPress – The Screen Options. Unselect the columns corresponding to WordPress SEO in screen options so that you don’t have to see them in post listings again. Screenshot Below

Hide Wordperss SEO Columns