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

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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:
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In the classic words of one Sheldon Lee Cooper – “Ah, Ubuntu, my favourite Linux-based operating system”. Sometimes Linux makes things so easy, it’s almost laughable. Take, for instance, my current requirement to batch convert hundreds of Nikon RAW (NEF) files to JPEG, and place them in a separate directory. It turns out that the only way this could have been easier would have been if someone else had actually done it for me. It was that easy!! 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:

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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…