My upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 was, as usual, a painless experience. The controversial shopping lens integration doesn’t bother me, and overall the installation went well – apart from one minor flaw! Read more…
It’s been a busy few weeks here in the mattrudge.net tower. Firstly a break-in at the house left me bereft of laptop, digital camera, and other devices. Secondly, while in Italy, our rental car was broken into, which relieved me of my remaining gadgets, and finally a high-level hacking decision was evidently taken to bring down the menace of my NTP server, since I was knocked off the Internet by a Denial of Service attack! For one issue I had to edit the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter from 3G Internet on my phone!
Anyway, that’s just a moan, and nothing to do with the title of this blog post. Synchronicity is wonderful – I was just actually looking at how to change the tty resolution on a console-only Ubuntu Server, when the same question popped up on the Ubuntu Forums. Read more…
The sad and rather sudden demise of Kim’s netbook has left us considering exactly what kind of device to replace it with. On the one hand, it ran extremely well for four years with a variety of *buntu installations – most recently Xubuntu; on the other hand, Kim feels that everything she wants to do could be done with a tablet – or more specifically an iPad. She does, however, need some native Windows applications, which ran under Wine on the netbook, and for which there’s no iOS equivalent.
Proving the old adage (which I just made up) of “where there’s a geek, there’s a way”, I had the idea of installing her Wine applications to our Mythbuntu-based home media centre, and letting her access them via an SSH tunnel. Read more…
Just in case anyone was wondering, I haven’t been abducted by Linux-loving aliens. Nor have I inexplicably dropped off the face of the planet. The reasons behind my lack of recent posts are firstly – a lack of time; secondly – and happily – my Ubuntu 12.04 installation has been so unbelievably stable that it hasn’t required much tinkering or tweaking at all!
Anyway, this isn’t a technical problem, nor is it specifically Ubuntu-related, but I think it comes under the category of ubuntu with a small “u”; the philosophy of community, mutual support, and giving back when you can. That’s what I thought when I read the June 21st 2012 news release on www.pool.ntp.org. The full release can be read here. The chances are that you’re already using servers of the NTP project – even if you don’t realise it. So I decided to give a bit back and join the pool with my Ubuntu server and static IP. If you want to help out too, then it’s fairly easy to set up. 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…
For no other reason than “it looks nice” (and showing snooty Windows users that we can do anything they can do – and in hundreds of different ways 
), I decided to set up my desktop wallpaper to change at different times throughout the day.
There are programs in the repositories which will do this (notably CREBS and wallch), but I like to keep things reasonably light by not having too many other processes running in the background.
The standard desktop background applet comes with this functionality built in, and creating your own slideshow from scratch is a fun and geeky project. Read more…
A nice thing about Linux in general is how you can tweak different settings to your liking. For example, let’s say that you don’t like the default date and time layout in the Unity tray, and you want to change it to look like this:
Read more…
If you’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, then you may be pining for the days when you could just right-click on the desktop and create a new launcher (or “shortcut” – if you’re still using Windows-speak). I’m not sure why this function was deemed surplus to requirements, since it was one of the first things I went looking for. There is an answer but, as with all things with Linux, the trick is to ask the right questions. Read more…
Continuing my series of fun things to fix after an upgrade, I had an interesting issue after my Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot upgrade. Intermittently, when moving the mouse to the left of the screen or changing into expo, an opaque orange snap box would appear on the left side of the screen. The box would persist through changing into and out of expo, and often would only go when I log out and back in again.
A screenshot of the problem is below:
Each time I upgrade Ubuntu, something small seems to stop working. Nothing too major – thankfully my trusty old Dell laptop seems to be quite Ubuntu-friendly.
The upgrade to Unity seemed to stop my NumLock from working at the login screen. After I logged in to Ubuntu, NumLock would illuminate, but at the login screen it remained off. It doesn’t take much to confound my less-than-stellar muscle memory, so since I always use the number pad to input the numbers in my password, logging in was frustrating.
Anyway, the good news is – if you have the same strange affliction – it’s not too difficult to fix. Read more…
