Posts Tagged ‘linux’
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
I’m quite happy with Ubuntu. If a user didn’t have to be tied into specific, Windows-only applications, I’d recommend it. It’s stable, fast, intuitive and pretty.
My one annoyance is what the latest release has done to CD/DVD drive naming. In the past, my machine’s first DVD drive was hda. For no reason whatsoever, Ubuntu decide to call it sr0. Similarly, the drive’s name for command-line tools now has a different specification.So all my applications need to be told where the drives are; a pain.
Maybe I’ve been at this too long - I still like to use applications that I can see what’s running in the background, so I use grip over gstreamer (mainly because, unless you’re using lame, I’m not listening to your mp3s), cdrdao over (whatever the young kids are using today to burn gapless audio). At the very least, I would have liked to get a summary of changes when I upgraded Ubuntu. Better still, I’d have liked a list of reasons for the changes. Unless my CD/DVD drive is now faster and more secure, why change?
Tags: cdrom, linux, ubuntu
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
Tags: linux, ubuntu
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
How did I manage to go for so long without knowing about screen? screen allows you to create several connection sessions to a terminal, switch between them, detach from them, then reconnect from anywhere. I’d previously had to to set up long-running remote jobs as background jobs, relying on nohup and various methods to prevent terminal output. But no more!
This page taught me all I know about screen: screen: Keep Your Processes Running Despite A Dropped Connection
Tags: gnu, linux, screen, ssh, terminal, yay
Posted in computers suck | 4 Comments »
Friday, December 7th, 2007
I saw the most obscene markup in indigo this evening: the Linux Format OpenOffice.org special edition was priced at a hefty $34.95. This costs £10 in the UK.
The thing is, UK prices are quoted tax-inclusive. The ten quid you see is the ten quid you pay. Not so in Canada. In the most boneheaded move ever, our prices don’t include tax, so that $34.95 really costs you $39.84 (in Ontario, at least).
According to Google, £10 is $20.53. Indigo’s markup is almost 100%
Tags: canada, indigo, linux, magazine, openoffice, ripoff
Posted in books, computers suck | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
We got our smart meter installed today. Unfortunately, Catherine didn’t quite understand why there was a knock on the door, then her computer went beeeeyyooooww … then all our clocks caught the <blink> tag.
While I like smart meters, this one isn’t quite as smart as it could be. To me, a smart meter needs to have a big display of your current demand, and needs to be inscribed with a suitable message like “Quit using so much juice, you cretin!” It also needs to hook into local time-of-use pricing, which me being green and a Bullfrog customer and all, I don’t get to take part in. Boo.
But what could have really gone sideways was my own desktop, which was quietly chugging away installing Ubuntu 7.10. Since I started using Linux in 1995, I don’t think I’ve ever had a system upgrade go totally smoothly. This time, though, I was lucky - the system must have fully initialised before we lost power.
I can’t honestly say I see any difference between Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon; they both are fairly pretty, and just work.
Tags: linux, smart_meter, toronto, ubuntu
Posted in Wind Things, computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
I reinstalled Ubuntu completely last night, and took the opportunity to go to AMD64 mode. I had to sacrifice the cheapo ndiswrapper wireless card, so am now running a switch off the wireless bridge. So it works now!
It looks like Perl really doesn’t like 64-bit. CPAN’s having difficulty building.
Tags: 64_bit, amd64, linux, ndiswrapper, perl, ubuntu
Posted in computers suck | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
Upgraded Ubuntu from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft last night … and it was surprisingly painless. Sure, it took all night to download, and it did require me to fiddle about using the wireless access point as an ersatz eth0 to get ndiswrapper happy, but I’m not complaining.
I’m still not running in 64 bit though, as I don’t know if there are drivers for some of my cards in AMD64. It’s not a priority, though — everything’s adequately fast as is.
Tags: drake, eft, linux, painless, ubuntu, upgrade
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Sunday, March 25th, 2007
… a USB key with the irritating U3 software uninstalled.
Seriously, U3 is a major annoyance if you:
- use Mac
- use Linux
- work on a PC with locked-down permissions
- work on a PC with a one-letter drive gap (like having
D: and F:, but no E:); U3’s read-only system will appear in the gap, but your data won’t be accessible.
(It’s not really U3’s fault. The fact that Windows still has drive letters amazes me; why don’t they go for the whole 70s thing and have punch cards and gargantuan 5MB hard disk packs?)
All four of the above apply to me, so u3 uninstall.exe is my friend.
Tags: annoyance, linux, mac, u3, uninstall, usb, windows, yay
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
This is one that the support desk of my employer really should’ve answered, but they gave their usual, “You mentioned Macintosh in your e-mail, so this conversation stops here” response.
Anyway, they’ve just upgraded their Citrix access, and what used to work now gives the rather cruddy response:
Just what SSL Error 0: You have not chosen to trust “Entrust.net Secure Server Certification Authority”,the issuer of the server’s security certificate. Error number: 183 is supposed to mean to anyone, I don’t know. (Well, actually, I do know, but in rants like this it’s customary to feign ignorance in a huffy manner. Work with me here, people.)
So, to fix this:
- Make sure that Citrix ICA Client is installed
- Go to entrust.net/developer and click on Download Root Certificates
- Select Personal Use, and click on Download Certificates
- Download entrust_ssl_ca.cer and entrust_ssl_ca.der to your desktop
- Open a terminal (it’s in Applications/Utilities), and enter the following:
cd /Applications/Citrix\ ICA\ Client/keystore/cacerts/
cp -p ~/Desktop/entrust_ssl_ca.* .
ln -s entrust_ssl_ca.cer entrust_ssl_ca.crt
- Exit the terminal, and try your Citrix session again.
There might be some unnecessary steps there, and this might all be fixed by downloading the latest release of the ICA client, but this works for me now.
Tags: citrix, linux, mac
Posted in computers suck | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, June 28th, 2005
Had to revert to 2.4 again, as the suspend-to-RAM only worked for a short while, becoming a suspend-to-RAM-and-sit-there-and-do-nothing. Gr.
Tags: linux, thinkpad
Posted in computers suck | No Comments »
