Tag Archives: ubuntu

About two weeks ago my work laptop died. The motherboard just bricked itself to pieces and there was no rescuing it. As my old machine was old and decrepit, and I was going to be replacing it with something with … Continue reading →

This fine morning KDE greeted me with a particularly nasty warning: Seems like it is time for some spring cleanup… And by spring, I of course mean winter. But where to start? Well, the best place is usually to nuke … Continue reading →

In the last week or so the Java plugin on my laptop completely broke. I’m not sure what exactly has happened but it just stopped working. At first Chrome started complaining that my Java is out of date but I … Continue reading →

I have inherited yet another old laptop. This time it is a lovely Compaq Presario 1800. If you have never actually seen one of these, here is how it looks like: I have no clue what is it with my … Continue reading →

Around the time I reviewed Chromium OS, I managed to totally b0rk one of my thumb drives. I somehow botched the dd command, and the device became unusable. When I plugged it in, nothing would happen. Or rather nothing on … Continue reading →

Did they name Ubunu 9.10 Karmic on purpose, and then had it ruin the lives of the wicked people? My upgrade was an absolute train wreck. I spent my whole afternoon, and evening fixing it, and managed to accidentally delete … Continue reading →

Recently a friend of mine approached me with a weird question: how to install Windows on a machine without a CD or Floppy drive. I was intrigued. The obvious question here was “why?” It turned out that he just ordered … Continue reading →

I hardly ever use the touchpad on my laptop. At work, my morning routine is plugging in my external monitor, ethernet cable and the USB hub into the back of my machine. Yes, I could get a docking station but … Continue reading →

This has been driving me nuts since I have upgraded to Firefox 3.0.1 on my laptop like a month ago. I’m still running Gutsy on that thing, and only the beta version (which crashes a lot) is in the repositories. … Continue reading →

I just figured out how to create an installation package in any of the popular formats (deb, rpm, etc..) in under 30 seconds. This method is probably not something you’d want to use for a serious project, but it is … Continue reading →

I still have Gutsy on my work computer. I should really upgrade it to Hardy but unfortunately “dist upgrade in progress” is not really an acceptable excuse for not doing actual work so I keep putting it away. Ideally I … Continue reading →

Well, the Nethack Server is gone. I know that couple of people played on it, and Anthony even ascended but it is now gone. It was actually off line for months now and I didn’t even notice. It got knocked … Continue reading →

I’m pleased to say that my old trusty Linksys WPC54G ver 1.2 works without ndiswrapper Hardy Heron. I have been using this card since Hoary, but never “natively”. My last attempt at installing it was under Feisty and I failed. … Continue reading →

I love how anti-linux advocates and windows fanbois always pick on Linux for hardware compatibility or rather lack of thereof. Just about every rant about Linux I have seen so far includes a gripe about it not supporting new or … Continue reading →

I said it before, and I’ll say it again – Linux is not for everyone. Convincing people to switch their primary OS is a little bit like trying to convince someone to change their religion, or political views. It’s possible, … Continue reading →

My office has several network printers. Most of them are HP and have zero issues using them from under Linux. They worked right out of the box – all I had to do was to set them up as Windows/Samba … Continue reading →

Every once in a while I need to use windows centric applications at work. IE is the least of my problems since it seems to work semi-reliably under Wine. But sometimes I need to test things in a full Windows … Continue reading →

At the beginning of the month, Adobe finally had a sudden bowel movement and defecated an AIR release for Linux all over the internets. Naturally it is an alpha release, which means some things may still be very, very broken. … Continue reading →

I must confess that Rails makes me feel stupid every time I use it. The accepted truism about the framework is that it boosts your productivity like no other. Unfortunately people forget to tell you that there is second part … Continue reading →

When I was writing Your First Steps With Linux I really wanted to mention Wubi as an alternative to live CD but somehow it did not make it into the post. Human memory is funny this way sometimes. It’s really … Continue reading →

Installation wizards have their place. For example, when you are installing and configuring an operating system a wizard is your best friend. The design of the wizard is paramount as it is often the very first thing your user sees. … Continue reading →

I got my brand new Dell Latitude D830 laptop today, and the first thing I did with it was installing Gutsy. Dell was nice enough to partition the drive for me so I didn’t have to bother with resizing. This … Continue reading →

Over the years I think I helped to influence few people here and there to actually start experimenting with linux. I count that as a personal success. I’m sure I was not the primary influence in most cases, but I’m … Continue reading →

Last week I said that I will try Gutsy on Dell Inspiron 600m that is sitting here in the office. When I booted it with Kubuntu Dapper I was really impressed that almost everything worked out of the box. I … Continue reading →

I have a spare Dell Inspiron 600m laptop sitting in the office here. It is quite a decent machine with 1.4 GHz and 2GB of RAM. Not top of the line or anything, but actually much better than my shoddy … Continue reading →