Recent Entries

External Harddrives

I have a Seagate external harddrive and I haven't been able to access the data on it since I switched to Ubuntu. I was wondering if there was anyway to access this information or if I'm better off just getting a new external. And if I do have to get a new external can I buy any brand?

Entry tags:

how-to,
ubuntu

Re Ubuntu 10.04

Lambada Llama or whatever it's called:

I upgraded yesterday, and had no Firefox issues as it happens, but one change that is not optional is a move of the window control buttons to the left side.

I found this quick and easy fix that put them back where my mouse hand thinks they should be: Move Ubuntu 10.04 Window Buttons from Left to Right with 1 Command

Entry tags:

audacity,
ubuntu

Audacity woes

I've got xubuntu 9.10 and audacity 1.36 and I'm trying to make them play nicely together. I've got ALSA set up so the mic is in and I can get it to play the audio from the mic out to the speakers, but audacity is not registering any sound whatsoever.

Can someone tell me in small words if I need to disable pulseaudio and how I would go about doing that?

Current Mood: annoyed

Hmmm..not good.

Upgraded Ubuntu to 10.0 Lucid Lynx ... so far every things fine except Firefox [3.6]. Which won't run, at all. Luckily I've Chrome installed otherwise that would be a serious problem.

Word to the wise...hold off on upgrading unless you've a backup web browser installed.

Entry tags:

web browsers

Firefox 3.7 alpha

I've got an Acer Aspire One netbook running Linpus Lite (Acer's OS based on Fedora 8)

Ever since I first upgraded to Firefox 3.x it would decide to hang for several seconds every half hour or so. I thought maybe Firefox was getting too big for my tiny netbook, but a while back I found out it was common problem for Aspires and just kept crossing my fingers for it to be fixed in the next update... and the next... and the next. Today I revisited my favourite AAO blog and found out the problem has been fixed in the alpha build of 3.7. Suddenly browsing is smooth again, as well as faster than I remember!

Since it's an alpha build some of my add-ons, including Greasemonkey, PDF Download and Feed Sidebar aren't compatible but by I can survive until 3.7 goes to the public. Just thought I'd pass this along in case others are having similar problems.

Current Mood: dorky

Fedora vs. Ubuntu...

With the understanding that this is a total long shot: Has anyone switched from RHEL/Fedora to Ubuntu recently?

I started with RH based distros ~10 years ago, and managed a RHEL server and a few Fedora workstations for a few years for work, so Fedora felt like a natural choice for me when I decided to go linux only on my home desktop. I've been mostly happy with it, I'm very comfortable with yum and the RH way of doing things.

I did try Ubuntu briefly a few years ago and did run Debian on a desktop for a while ~2003, and while they were fine in that I didn't have big problems, I always felt like things were just a little different and in the end I went back to RH because it was good enough and familiar.

So here's the thing, I'm pondering switching to Ubuntu for both my primary desktop and my (2 year old now) Eee netbook. I don't really want to have 2 incompatible distros to work with and part of the motivation is that Ubuntu still maintains a netbook remix/spin but I'm fairly sure Fedora has dropped theirs (I can't find it.) It also seems like there are more packages available for Ubuntu or that they're more readily available.

Has anyone made this sort of switch? What did you feel you gained? Did you feel like you lost anything? Any gotchas that you encountered?

Anyone on the Ubuntu side of the fence have a good compelling reason to switch? I'm honestly not unhappy with Fedora just trying to see if the grass is greener on the other side.

And for the sake of some pretty: ( Have a few recent desktop screenshots... )

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: none

Entry tags:

eXpostulate (x-posting client)

Hi,

I'm posting to this community using eXpostulate, a cross-posting blog client that I've built in Tcl/Tk.

eXpostulate is pretty rudimentary, at most levels, but has some nifty features on others. I have plans to make more modifications, especially in specific reference to dreamwidth (need to modify insertion menu to include DW specific tags for cut, user, community, etc.), adding more entry fields for location, privacy, etc.

But the advantage that eXpostulate has is that one can write a post, then simply click 4 buttons and fire said post off to four different blog communities (livejournal, insanejournal, deadjournal & dreamwidth). Unlike other clients (logjam, for instance) the user need not login to service1, write post, send post, reload post, logout, login into service2, send post, reload post ...
Once the post is written, it can be x-posted to all four, and to as many relevant communities, with relative ease and efficiency.

eXpostulate

eXpostulate is "themable" (user may configure the colors of the interface), posts to 4 blogging services (soon to come, wordpress and blogger functions, as well, possibly more), and has some useful editing functions (will be adding more html tag insertion options soon, too).

eXpostulate has been developed on a debian/gnu/linux stable system, but is crossplatform. Additionally, eXpostulate is released according to the terms of the Gnu Public License v. 3, or later.

./

tonybaldwin

Current Mood: frustrated

Entry tags:

web browsers

Un-Chromatic

I've been trying out the Google Chrome browser, because Firefox is a resource hog.
Verdict: very very close, but no cigar.
It is fast, it is lean, it is pretty. Why, then, am I leaving it cigarless?
( there are reasons, my Precious )
Perhaps I might have been willing to put up with one of these defects, but not all of them. I'm not ruling out Chrome completely, but I shall wait until it improves.

Then I tried out Opera. Bah! It was worse than Firefox. It drove me nuts. I'd click on a link and randomly Opera would decide to sit there and think and chew up 100% of the CPU before it would give me the page in question. ( and more complaints )

(Cross-posted from my journal)

new LJ client

Hi all,

I'm writing a new LJ client (C++ / Qt4) with a focus on crossposting. The current version can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/qtxpost/. Feedback is greatly appreciated!

Ubuntu's new brand

Have you seen Ubuntu's new logo and colors? I like it :) I've never been a huge fan of Ubuntu's 'old' colors, they've always seemed so boring...

Pointer: blog post, "RANT: Is the Linux dream a myth?"

I came across this blog post in the openSUSE forums: RANT: Is the Linux dream a myth?

I've met a few characters that are living the Linux dream or at least claiming to. But here's the rub... is there anyone who's exclusively using it? I don't mean "I've got Linux installed on my USB stick" or "I dual boot". Is there anyone who is actually using Linux as there sole operating system. Booting into everyday to check their email, write their documents, develop their code, surf the web and yes.. play their games. I fear there is not.

Having used Linux exclusively for almost a year, and knowing people who've been Linux-exclusive for longer than that, not to mention MAC USERS, the author seems naive or sheltered. Which surprises me, as he's a coder - apparently I'm prejudiced about coders :o)

Entry tags:

Icon tutorial for Gimp novices + poll on other possible tutorials

I posted an icon tutorial for creating gradient-coloured text on transparent background at

gimp_gate - mirrored at my journal, where I'm also polling for interest in other tutorials.

Current Mood: aggravated

HELP!

Ok...does anyone know how to hack the on/off software switch for the wifi card on a Packard-Bell EasyNote r1000 laptop? [card model is an Atheros 5BMB5] I already have the driver, it's the software switch to turn the card on/off that's the problem!]

I've been trying to hack all day, and I'm going a bit nuts here. Already tried the suggested fix for the r1001 model, but that didn't work. [there doesn't seem to be a specific fix].

Entry tags:

gimp

GIMP icon tutorials?

I'd really love to see someone do an icon tutorial in GIMP - both how to make image and text interesting. Do you know of anyone making (pretty) icons in GIMP?

Entry tags:

filesystems,
polls

Poll: Preferred filesystem?

Poll #2009

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

View Respondents

What is your preferred filesystem?

View Answers

ext3
2 (12.5%)

ext4
3 (18.8%)

Other (please comment!)
4 (25.0%)

I don't know enough about filesystems to answer
7 (43.8%)

Today I installed Ubuntu to a USB drive

Because I don't have a hard drive in this computer yet, and it just works and I am kind of amazed at how far the process has come. I'm remembering my first Linux installation experiences, like OpenSUSE or Mandriva or something or other years and years ago, and the first one that I actually stuck with, which was Gentoo, because after spending two days sweating through that installation with all the compiling and figuring out kernel options you bet I was going to actually use it, yessir.

Current Mood: crazy

arrggh!!

Ok, somebody please help me before I go insane[er]...

How do I set up an External USB NTFS HDD to act as a Samba share? [or at least accessable via a wireless network froma windows xp & vista box]

I've *done* all the recommended steps, set it up within samba-server with full read/write permissions and enable ntfs external write support. Does it work? No it does not...both linux and windows boxes come back with 'network access denied' error. They can *see* the drive, and sub-directories on it..but they cannot access it. Even logging with my root password won't get me access. It refuses to acknowledge any and all passwords as viable.

And when I remote in VNC and use the properties menu on the drive, the permissions tab for drive comes back a "permissions for drive 'My Book' are unable to be determined"...so I'm sorta assuming that it defaults to 'paranoid-as-hell' mode and denies access to the network unless told otherwise.

And yet...the internal drive is just fine...no problems.

help?!

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: Ubuntu

Entry tags:

mod post

Hello all: Quick Mod Announcement: Tag Permisions

Ello.

I have had a member request to change the tag permissions for the community.

Previously only I could create and edit new tags on posts. Now any community member can create and edit tags on posts.

If you have any community requests or suggestions please let me know, either via comments to this post or my Dreamwidth inbox.

Take care all

--Faintdreams ( your mostly hands-off moderator)

Entry tags:

grub,
grub 2

Grub 2 - experiences, opinions?

When I did a clean install of Karmic, it was the only OS on my hd, so I didn't even know there was a new Grub, until I saw a question on it in a forum.

I'm still not super-computer-savvy, so having learned how to edit the old Grub and using that lots, I wasn't happy to hear it had changed. I've avoided learning about it until today, when I clean-installed Karmic on my mom's computer, and needed to edit Grub to load the Windows partition manually.

Changing which partition to boot as well as timeout is easy, thankfully. And I really like that that you can set Grub to boot a specific partition, not just a number,* so updating kernels doesn't mess up booting.

I don't like that you can't set the menu to hidden when you have more than one OS installed - what's that all about?

I haven't figured out how to edit partition names in the menu (like, there are two Windows loaders according to the menu; would like to be able to differentiate more easily between the installer and thre OS proper), but I assume it's possible, too. That's for another day :o)

* Could you do this with the old Grub? I could've used it!

Current Mood: confused

installing from remote sources?

Please pardon the newbie question, but I must be missing something obvious!

I tried out my first Ubuntu install a couple of days ago; all my previous UNIX experience has been with LinuxPPC, which used RPM, and NetBSD, which used the BSD package management system.

My understanding of apt-get was that you could type "sudo apt-get install <package>" and it would go out, find the most recent version of the package from its list of sources, and install it for you along with any dependencies (like what CPAN does with Perl modules). But every time I try it, I get some sort of error about the package being missing or obsolete. (The package I was trying to install was emacs, which I'm confident is neither.)

I know it's doing something right, though, because when I type 'emacs' at a prompt it tells me I can use apt-get to install it, instead of just saying command not found.

Is my apt-get syntax correct? Do I need to configure a list of valid sources? Or am I doomed to manually download .deb files and install them manually, same as with .rpm?