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…
Despite the graphic below showing that Precise Pangolin was “almost here”, my Update Manager window popped up this afternoon to politely advise me that the new release of Ubuntu was, indeed, available and would I like to upgrade to the newest version? Being a sucker for a courteous dialog box, I clicked Upgrade, received proclamations of doom from +John Lewis, and waited… Read more…
I’ve been using Beta 2 for about ten days now, and it’s been polished and robust. So, leaving distribution politics aside for a moment, here’s my favourite six-monthly graphic:
Wow. What a few days it has been. I have to say that I certainly did not expect the reaction that my previous post generated! Call me naive (and that’s not the worst thing I’ve been called over the past few days), but I genuinely didn’t anticipate the amount of views, comments, and discussions on other forums that my opinion would cause.
This blog normally trundles along, receiving between 500 to 1,000 views per day, but the “Linux is alive” article spiked at twenty times that on the first day! I don’t want to thrash this subject to death, and I’m neither apologising nor backtracking on my views, but I want to address just a few of the points that were raised. Read more…
While helping to edit last week’s Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, I came across an article written by Tony Bradley of PC World entitled “Why Linux on the Desktop Is Dead”. In it he cited his “30 days with Ubuntu Linux” test as proof that Linux on the desktop is not, and will not be a credible option for users.
I don’t often use this blog to take exception to things I read (otherwise it’s probably all I’d ever do), but in this case, I felt that I had to respond. 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…
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…
