How to tell if your internet is up in Linux?

When on a local net or using wifi (that's just about everybody), you really need a way to tell if the "internet" is up or not.  Of course the network applet tells you the wifi or network is up, that is not what you need to know.  You need to know if the internet connection is up.  Here's a cool Gnome panel applet that does just that - it's just not installed on Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) by default.

Link Monitor Applet is a GNOME Panel Applet displaying the round-trip time to a set of hosts in a bar graph.

Link Monitor Applet features include:

• A line graph able to display up to one week of round-trip time data
• Country flags and names
• Full ICMP and ICMPv6 support
• HIG 2.0 compliance

Link Monitor Applet is free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

sudo apt-get install link-monitor-applet

After  install with the command above, add the applet to gnome panel.  Add the OpenDNS host 208.67.222.222 and Delay to 10 seconds, Graphs scale to 3 seconds, and Tooltip to 5 minutes.  That should get you started.  Now hover the mouse over the Link Monitor Applet and you can tell if you are up or down and for how long it's been down, etc.  Very nice tool!

Even the Windows network tool can't always tell if you are online:(  With Linux and this applet, you will always know if your internet connection is up and it's displayed in a nice little graph.

Reply to mailing list addon/patch for Thunderbird

Adds a "reply to mailing list" button to your toolbar and the message menu.

Reply to Mailing List addon for Thunderbird (experimental)

How can import GPG keys automatically from within Evolution?

If you receive a signed GPG/PGP message from someone and you do not yet have his public key in your GPG/PGP keyring. You can make GPG automatically download and add unknown GPG/PGP keys of received messages by adding the following two lines to the file $HOME/.gnupg/gpg.conf:

       keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net
       keyserver-options auto-key-retrieve

The actual link (URI) to the keyserver is only one example and may be different - you can also choose other servers.

How to make middle mouse click scroll

Just add these lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in Hardy!

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Configured Mouse"
    Driver        "mouse"
    Option        "CorePointer"
    Option        "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
    Option        "EmulateWheel" "true"
    Option        "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
EndSection

Sorry, no help in Jaunty.  Took a look at xorg.conf on a jaunty box and it was almost blank.  I hate the way they keep changing stuff.  Sticking with LTS for now.