Setting the keyboard layout with hal

Everytime when I start my X it has a US keyboard layout. After login I could change it with:

$ setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout de

to work with my german keyboard layout. But I have to do it everytime when I log in, which is not very professional. Even modifying the xorg.conf to load the german keyboard layout did not work:

Setting up a pppd server

Introduction

I tried to clean up my space a little bit and found some old modems and a analogue telephone system. Perfect for playing around, setting up a pppd server and client and remember some old times. And so I decided to create this small workshop. Maybe somebody wants/needs to do the same one day. Currently I am using the following hardware:

Extracting images from a pdf file

This week I went to the local photo shop in our town to scan some documents. I gave the salesperson my documents and he told me to come back in a couple of hours. I returned and received my scanned douments. At home I figured out that he gave me a CD with a couple of pdf files (my fault, I forgot to tell him that I need images). Here is a trick that will extract images from a pdf document:

rxvt and bash

I am using rxvt as my default terminal emulator when I am working on a WM. And I like bash as my default shell. My problem was that everytime I started rxvt it ignored /etc/profile. Here is the solution (found in man bash):