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…
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…
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…
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…
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:
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…
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…
