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…

Good old Skype, it seems to have been in Linux Beta forever! I suppose now that Skype is part of the happy Microsoft “family”, it probably always will.

Anyway, I recently had a problem where Skype would not open on my Ubuntu 11.04 laptop. Well, to be precise, Skype opened and closed immediately. The solution was simple enough. Read more…

As I said in my previous post, my upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (love the name) was almost perfect. I’m getting to grips with – and actually quite liking – the new Unity interface. I know that everyone’s opinion varies, and that whether you like a new UI or not is entirely personal and subjective. Here, though, are a few tweaks which have made Unity a bit more usable for me. Like adding your favourite folders (from the old “Places” menu) to the Home folder launcher. Read more…

I don’t really use Evolution much – it’s not just that I don’t agree with evolution as a theory (which is a completely different subject), but that I don’t use POP mail too much, and so Evolution (the mail client) tends to be of little use. A common problem, though, after not using it for a while can be the “Error Generating Message List” followed by other vague errors about corrupted disk images or folders. Fortunately the solution is quite simple. Read more…

Yay! Now it is the official banner. Narwhals…they are the Jedi of the sea!