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…

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…

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…

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:

Read more…

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…