Despite the graphic below showing that Precise Pangolin was “almost here”, my Update Manager window popped up this afternoon to politely advise me that the new release of Ubuntu was, indeed, available and would I like to upgrade to the newest version? Being a sucker for a courteous dialog box, I clicked Upgrade, received proclamations of doom from +John Lewis, and waited… Read more…
It’s time for a little break in our regular programming. Today, April 23rd, marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Britain’s largest selling home computer of the 1980′s. The Speccy was my first exposure to an actual computer – I still remember as a 9-year-old in 1982 when my dad brought one home. I clearly remember the smell of the polystyrene inserts as we opened the packaging, and being amazed at what this stylish little black box could do. Read more…
I’ve been using Beta 2 for about ten days now, and it’s been polished and robust. So, leaving distribution politics aside for a moment, here’s my favourite six-monthly graphic:
Wow. What a few days it has been. I have to say that I certainly did not expect the reaction that my previous post generated! Call me naive (and that’s not the worst thing I’ve been called over the past few days), but I genuinely didn’t anticipate the amount of views, comments, and discussions on other forums that my opinion would cause.
This blog normally trundles along, receiving between 500 to 1,000 views per day, but the “Linux is alive” article spiked at twenty times that on the first day! I don’t want to thrash this subject to death, and I’m neither apologising nor backtracking on my views, but I want to address just a few of the points that were raised. Read more…
While helping to edit last week’s Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, I came across an article written by Tony Bradley of PC World entitled “Why Linux on the Desktop Is Dead”. In it he cited his “30 days with Ubuntu Linux” test as proof that Linux on the desktop is not, and will not be a credible option for users.
I don’t often use this blog to take exception to things I read (otherwise it’s probably all I’d ever do), but in this case, I felt that I had to respond. Read more…
Shortly after my last post, my aging Dell Studio laptop learned the hard way that gravity can sometimes be a cruel and heartless mistress. I learned a couple of lessons too. Notably that 1) Dell Studio laptops do not bounce and 2) hardwood floors are called that for a reason. After recovering the pieces (well most of them), sadly the computer would no longer boot, and the screen was beyond repair.
I got myself set up again with a nice, Ubuntu-happy laptop, which I’ll tell you about in another post. I removed the hard drive from the old Dell and put it in a 2.5″ external USB enclosure to try to try and mount my /home partition for data recovery, which is when I got the dreaded “Bad superblock on /dev/sdb3″ error. Read more…
It’s been a while since we last saw the Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat around here! For all new visitors – that’s a deerstalker hat. It’s the one that Sherlock Holmes famously wore. It is not an armoured tortoise, or a 1950′s UFO movie prop. It’s my special icon reserved for when I’m feeling a little bit smug and happy that an annoying problem is now solved (or – in this case – worked around!).
My Dell Studio 17 is getting a little long in the tooth now. It happily accepts any and all updates that I throw at it, but each one adds a new brand of strangeness to the brew – not to mention the fact that the screen hinge is now held together with chicken wire and insulating tape! Anyway, a weird little problem started happening where, shortly after login, the touchpad would stop working. Read more…
I quite like the jungle sound when Ubuntu starts up. For some reason it reminds me of the sounds I heard at nighttime when we camped in the Serengeti, and – more importantly – reminds me that I’m not using Windows 
That being said, if you want to change the login sound, it’s very easy to do (I seem to say this a lot, don’t I? 
) Read more…
Oh the fun of general and non-specific error messages. The package management system is usually quite well behaved, but when it fails, you can get a series of errors each bewilderingly unhelpful. For instance, Ubuntu Software Center may give you an error telling you that you have no Internet connection and refuse to download any software – even when you’re happily browsing the Internet and downloading gigabytes of files in a different application.
So, what causes this seemingly nonsensical error, and how can you recover? Fortunately, the fix is quite easy. Read more…
I’m happy to mention here that, today, I was graciously granted Ubuntu Membership as a result of forums participation 
