Linux for Keysers | Adventures in Open Source

I don't mean to be completely cynical, but it seems like Ubuntu's releases have sort of lost their 'umph' over the past few releases. 10.04 seems like the last "big deal" to come from Canonical, and even that's debatable. Some would claim 8.04 or 8.10 as the last big thing. As for 11.04, I don't know if it's the promised break with Gnome as the default desktop, lack of ground breaking improvements, or what, but it just doesn't seem to be getting the clout 8.x, 9.x, and even 10.04 releases had. Personally, I'm done with non-LTS releases unless something EXTREMELY significant comes along. I guess you can tell that the switch to Unity doesn't impress me all that much. Honestly, I just haven't seen the same level of innovation I had grown accustomed to in past releases. I could be wrong, so let's hear your thoughts.

Just cracked open the old blog and noticed that I haven't posted since Sept (!) and I wanted to post something, so here it is. I bought a house last month so I've been a bit busy with all of that. In fact, my "me" time that I used to use to play around with all the new technology out there has been significantly reduced. I will say that I have spent a few days playing around with Tomcat6, Spring tc Server, and more than a handful of various .WAR files. I have to say I'm impressed. Incredibly powerful, simple, and useful technologies don't always find their way to the masses, but this is definitely a win. I'm still torn as to whether or not this makes more or less sense than a Python-based solution, but so far, I'm up for further investigation. What do you think? What's your favorite webapp platform and why? What languages do you tend to go to when it's "your program" and not someone else's? And for the million-dollar follow-u...

We're rapidly approaching the release date of the next Ubuntu release: 10/10/2010 (whoa, how's that for an epic release date?). I'm still on the fence about "upgrading" because I like the idea of stability for a while (at least on my work computer). I'll definitely be tossing this on a test machine once it releases. I'll use it to show off the next gen of features if nothing else. For the uninitiated, the features list can be found here . My understanding of this release is that it'll be a playground for many cutting edge features. Stability is definitely not one of the key goals. What are your plans for this release? Production? Playground? Testing? Skip it? Let us know in the comments!

Dual booting. It can be a wonderful thing or a horrible nightmare. With Windows 7, users may have more than one reason to want the ability on their HTPC machines. Especially if several pieces of hardware just don't work as they should in Ubuntu. The trick is, Windows 7, by default, wants to be the ONLY OS on your computer, even if you've already installed other OSes. My recommendation? Install Windows 7 first, in a carefully planned partition (create using Ubuntu LiveCD and GParted, of course), and then install Ubuntu. But what if you just HAD to install Ubuntu first in that secondary partition and now need to install Windows? Windows will erase your Grub settings from the boot sector. This means no more ability to boot into Ubuntu. Oh No! Not to worry, there's an easy way to recover from said disaster. I found this excellent post and here are the details for archival purposes: This post discusses the easy way of restoring Grub2 using Ubuntu Live CD. First, boot with the...

Really just posting this for my own reference later, but here's the link and the details: Enter this into your Terminal it is the code for the firmware and to install it Code: wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/22xxdrv_27086.zip wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/HVR-12x0-14x0-17x0_1_25_25271_WHQL.zip wget http://www.steventoth.net/linux/hvr22xx/extract.sh Code: sh extract.sh;sudo cp *fw /lib/firmware you need to install mercurial and build essential for the next steps Code: sudo apt-get install mercurial libncurses5-dev then we need the driver using this command to fetch Code: hg clone http://kernellabs.com/hg/saa7164-stable/ now change to the directory Code: cd saa7164-stable then run make Code: make CONFIG_DVB_FIREDTV:=n that will take some time, go grab a drink and wait it out, when it completes run this command Code: sudo make install wait for that to complete and reboot from the command line Code: sudo reboot Note that an application like TVtime will not ...

I recently setup a Win 2008 R2 VM and proceeded to remote connect to it from Ubuntu 10.04. Everything worked perfectly except the mouse cursors were black (and some were corrupt). Solution? Use a newer version of rdesktop that doesn't ship with Ubuntu. There is a handy PPA that can be added using the following command: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ricolai/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install rdesktop [UPDATE] It appears ricolai may have removed the package from his PPA. To remedy the situation, I've uploaded the working binaries for x64. Sorry, I don't have the x86 any longer. More information on the bug can be found here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rdesktop/+bug/385974?comments=all

The internal microphone does not work after a default install. Append the line "options snd-hda-intel model=dell-s14" to file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, reboot and adjust the mixer levels.