I’ve always had mixed feelings about Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux. While they’ve made great contributions to free software, they’ve also been very inconsistent in their commitment to software freedom. Mark Shuttleworth’s response to the privacy concerns in Ubuntu 12.10 has fundamentally shattered my trust. An Uneasy History From […]
ubuntu
26 posts
Updated: I’ve updated this guide to detail a proper sync with Snowy, rather than the old Unison hack (below), since Conboy now supports more than just Ubuntu One, and an experimental version Snowy is operational. I’ve been a regular user of the fantastic Tomboy note-taking application since I replaced my […]
This is a quick fix for a problem I had when upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04, after having used the Mozilla PPA. The Firefox upgrade failed during the distribution upgrade process (from 9.10 to 10.04). I was told to run `dpkg -a –configure`, and the same error occurred again (it’s in […]
Just posting a quick fix to a problem I had with using 7z to extract an archive. I could list the contents of the archive, but any attempts to extract gave an “Unsupported Method” error. Dan Jacobson posted a solution to the debian bug tracking system, which is to install […]
I was happy to discover earlier today that Ubuntu 9.04 includes Amarok 2. But once I figured out how to queue up some music (which took a little time), I realized that nothing would play. This was the standard output when I ran it from the command line: balleyne@balleyne-laptop:~$ amarok […]
Heather, my girlfriend fiancée, was kind enough to buy me an OpenMoko Freerunner in January. I went out to get a new SIM card (since there were known issues with my current one) and I experimented with it for a couple weeks, but had to leave it be lately as […]
I’m pretty sure this is the same fix I used in Gutsy and Hardy, but I had to do it again to get my ThinkVantage button working on my ThinkPad T61 in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. I just added the following line to /usr/share/hotkey-setup/ibm.hk and it worked after a reboot. setkeycodes […]
Overall, I’ve been pretty happy after upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, but there were a few annoyances. I noticed my Thinkpad scroll buttons stopped working, and when I checked xorg.conf, all my changes were commented out with a note “HAL is now used.” At least wasn’t too hard to figure out […]
I found this a while back and it’s pretty old, but I just came across it again recently and had a good laugh. There’s an unofficial Ubuntu distribution called Ubuntu Christian Edition and this blog has a ton of hilarious[ly nerdy] “facts” about it, for example… In Ubuntu Christian Edition, […]