Ubuntu and other geekery
Ubuntu
TestDrive – Test Latest Ubuntu Build in a VM
Feb 25th
Just linking to a page where is explained how you can test the latest Ubuntu builds in a virtualmachine like VirtualBox. This means you won’t have to screw up any of your systems and won’t be left with a buggy OS..
Keep an eye on this site btw, they have some nice articles!
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/02/testdrive-automatically-downloads-and.html
Ubuntu Lucid Software Center Thoughts
Feb 25th
As some of you might have noticed there’s been a lot of hype around the new Software Center that will come with Ubuntu Lucid. People seem very enthusiastic about it and for GUI jockeys it is a major step forward (I guess). Personally, however, I never use a GUI to install my software and only rely on command-line aptitude commands to install and update.
The biggest step forward has to be the inclusion of PPA’s in the list. Being able to see exactly what packages a PPA has available is quite a nice feature imho. Something that I haven’t figured out how to do on the command-line (although I haven’t really searched very well).
Somehow I get the feeling they took some of the functionality from UbuntuTweak and added that to Ubuntu itself. UbuntuTweak already had the option to add PPA’s to your list of apt sources, but it lacks the option to see the packages made available by these PPA’s.
In case you are not up-to-date on this whole PPA thing here’s an explanation from Launchpad.net (the place where the PPA’s are all hosted):
Using a Personal Package Archive (PPA), you can distribute software and updates directly to Ubuntu users. Create your source package, upload it and Launchpad will build binaries and then host them in your own apt repository. That means Ubuntu users can install your packages in just the same way they install standard Ubuntu packages and they'll automatically receive updates as and when you make them.Every individual and team in Launchpad can have one or more PPAs, each with its own URL.Packages you publish in your PPA will remain there until you remove them, they're superseded by another package that you upload or the version of Ubuntu against which they're built becomes obsolete.
What does this mean for you?
Basically you can add a PPA to your apt sources list to install software made by Ubuntu users. A lot of times it is possible to get updated versions of Ubuntu packages through the PPA’s, think of handy apps like VLC, Wine, Firefox, etc.
iMac sound fix under Ubuntu
Feb 17th
I’ve been living with this problem for quite some time now and today I had some time left over at work so I figured I’d have a look into it again. I’ve tried a few different settings from the Ubuntu wiki but they always resulted in the same tinny sound.
My colleague who sits in the same room runs OSX on his iMac and has pretty decent sound, but under Ubuntu the sound is horrible. Today he isn’t here so I have to live with horrible sound and was getting quite annoyed so I decided to have a look at it.. The sound is very tinny, like someone hung an ear-bud into a coke can and cranked up the volume. Thanks to this fix I am now able to enjoy the same quality sound as I had under OSX:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8793845#post8793845
In a nutshell it comes down to this:
Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf :
options snd-hda-intel model=mb31 power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
Sidux: Not as reliable as I’d hoped
Feb 10th
So I’ve been running Sidux for a few days now. It started off wonderfully: my homeserver felt snappier than ever before running bog standard Ubuntu. However, after having installed my usualy Apache and MySQL for testing some development things at home the machine has been crashing at random times. Usually when I’m not home. This is the biggest problem, since I can’t get into the machine at all anymore, so a reset is out of the question. Also my WoW guild didn’t have teamspeak last night because it had crashed and I wasn’t home but at a work dinner.
So, I’ve decided to try and get the best of both worlds by starting with a simple command-line install of Ubuntu and then installing only the packages I need. I will also not be using Gnome but XFCE, maybe combining it with OpenBox. You might be wondering why I’m not going for Xubuntu, and I’ll tell you: it’s almost just as bloated as normal Gnome.
The speed difference running Sidux was unbelievable, I was even able to play 720p on my server. Something I never thought would be possible with this kind of hardware.
So my experiment is not quite over yet and because I do require a little bit of stability I am going to stick with Ubuntu (although not a normal desktop install).
nVidia 195.x TV-Out broken in Linux
Feb 8th
I recently messed around with Karmic trying to get the newest nVidia drivers installed. However, this broke TV-Out on my system and I decided to then take the step and move to Sidux considering they had the latest drivers in the repo’s instead of having to do the binary install from downloaded drivers. My situation did not change however, whenever I added TVStandard to the screen options the machine would freeze with a black screen.
Today I’m a bit bored at work so I decided to take some time to Google this problem. At first I was almost ready to reinstall Ubuntu again since things just worked there with the 185 drivers but I didn’t want to give up so easy. I then stumbled upon this thread at nvnews.net. This describes my problem exactly considering I am running an nVidia Geforce 7600GS in the machine. I can’t verify that this works, but I thought I’d share it with everyone already.
Linux MD5 hash of a string
Feb 4th
It took me a while to find the right command for this so I decided to add it to the blog to save it for a later date 
echo -n ‘the_password’ | md5sum -
Very simple yet does exactly what I want. I’m still surprised this isn’t a standard function in Linux since md5sum exists why not md5string?
Ubuntu Karmic on iMac 20″
Dec 23rd
I had previously been running Ubuntu Jaunty and decided to do a fresh install of Karmic on my work machine (a 20″ iMac). I waited this long to make the jump because I still saw a lot of updates coming in every day on my machines at home, so I figured it would be better to wait a bit. Lately the amount of updates had decreased and were mostly for packages which weren’t too important.
I must say, everything went without a hitch, except for that the screen had lines moving over it on the open source ATi driver. So I installed the restricted driver from the Hardware Drivers tool and everything works beautifully.
I also had to change something to get my sound working but all-in-all I’m quite happy with how it went. Got everything up and running within an hour or two, something I can’t say if I had been running Windows (or even Mac OSX for that matter if you take into account it’s a clean install).
Canonical to remove Gimp from default Ubuntu installation
Nov 27th
To be honest I am quite happy about this decision, GIMP is a great package but I think a lot of people don’t use it. I, for one, don’t use my Ubuntu machine for any kind of graphical work and have no need for this. Another package I wouldn’t mind seeing removed is OpenOffice.
Maybe there should be an option in the installer which asks you what application you wish to install for regular tasks like office work or photo management/editing, with the almighty option: NONE.
We already have options like this in the alternative installer, but I would like to see a user-friendly menu to select these types of packages in the LiveCD as well. My main problem with Linux is that a lot of distro’s seem bloated. Sure, they don’t take too much diskspace, but I know that it could be even less. Sure, we have harddrive space to spare these days but it can be a bit frustrating to have some of these huge packages installed by default and not being able to remove them either (Gnome seems to rely on parts of OpenOffice and Gimp, from what I remember..)
Another bunch of packages we could do without are the default Gnome games..
A lot of distro’s seem to want to show off how complete Linux is, but it takes more time to properly uninstall all this software as it does to install it. Another reason to give the option is that it would save a lot of time to install the distro, considering Gimp and OpenOffice are pretty big packages.
Temporary fix Grub2 “not found uuid”
Nov 16th
I recently convinced my girlfriend to switch to Ubuntu instead of XP because her laptop had been infected a few times in the past. Installation went smoothly on her laptop, however it would not boot up because Grub2 was complaining about not finding the kernel and mentioned the UUID. After a lot of searching & experimenting I managed to solve the problem by removing this line from /boot/grub/grub.cfg:
search –no-floppy –fs-uuid –set fe971505-39b3-4efb-882c-d48a91cc9e60
I then went into Aptitude and set grub-pc and grub-common on hold so they don’t get updated anymore. Hopefully this will stop /boot/grub/grub.cfg from being rebuilt again.
So far Karmic is running quite good on her laptop though, eventhough it’s already quite some years old.
It’s a celeron m 1.6Ghz and I added an extra 1GB of ram so it’s around 1.26GB ram now.
I also replaced the haddrive to a brand new 250GB WDC Blue:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=512
I do hope the Ubuntu community manages to fix this, it’s a bit of a hassle and especially when you’re trying to convince your girlfriend that Linux > Windows
Ubuntu Karmic Koala officially released!
Oct 30th
Just to let everyone know: Karmic is out of beta and released officially!
Get out your party hats and get installing!
Ok, maybe you won’t be able to install so quickly because a lot of mirrors are completely swamped. My tip is to use torrents instead, the more people use them the faster it gets, unlike bog standard FTP/HTTP links
Another tip to speed up your downloads when using the Desktop installer:
Be sure to FIRST change your “Software Sources” to a local mirror before installing!
This might save you some time..
Alternate Installer:
(no graphical interface during install, most compatible method)
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-alternate-amd64.iso.torrent
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-alternate-i386.iso.torrent
Desktop installer:
(LiveCD which boots into Gnome, includes a graphical installer)
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
Netbook version:
(Tweaked for Atom based netbooks)
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-netbook-remix-i386.iso.torrent
Server edition:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso.torrent
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.iso.torrent
Wubi:
For Windows users who don’t want to format / make a seperate partition and just want to try out Ubuntu, download Wubi and run it. It will let you install Ubuntu in a single file on your harddrive and add a boot option so you can choose between Windows and Ubuntu. You should be aware this is not the recommended way to run Ubuntu, but it’s quite a nice way to give it a try without changing anything drastic on your system.
http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/wubi.exe
Google Trends:
Just out of curiosity I am linking the last 30 days overview of Ubuntu searches on Google (from Google Trends).
I hope to see a sharp increase in this graph in the coming day(s), but I might be mistaken.
EDIT: There was indeed a peak! Removed the image now as it’s passed.