Somewhere out there!

I haven’t posted here for a while. Usually because my google searches turn up the answers pretty quickly, so I don’t feel the need to add anything additional via this blog.

Nautilus 3.6 on 13.04 is inane! They have gotten rid of drop down menus as far as I can tell.

While trying to figure out how to connect to a file share via the file explorer – a completely reasonable and supposedly simple task – I discovered that it was no longer easily possible on the 13.04 file explorer. I lot of hunting and I finally discovered a post that gave me the magic keyboard combination in order to open a file location dialog: CTRL-L.

Once I had this is was relatively easily to connect to the remote server I wanted. After that right-click add bookmark is your friend.

It’s really stupid when the backend can still do things, but the power of the front end is reduced.

Edit: Sigh… It is worse that I thought. Dropping tree view is a particularly egregious crime.

If you have a BSOD crash and the BIOS defaults after a checksum error, make sure you check the SATA ACHI/IDE settings. Otherwise window will not boot and you’ll get confused.

Not to disrespect Ubuntu, but Jaunty must be the worse release they have made in a long time. Whether it be an unusable desktop because of a poor kernel – upgrading to 2.6.30 is a good idea – or just poor packaging – md overwriting the mdadm.conf file? WTF?  See here and here for the workaround lists, and here to fix the md issue.

Karmic is getting good reviews. Lets hope its an easy upgrade and sets the scene for an amazing 10.4 release.

Here  some results from testing I did in August 2009 on  KVM with the three different disk image drivers. First a single disk system running Ubuntu x64 9.04:

I haven’t seen much yet to confirm this deal, but if it does happen next week it mark an interesting change in course.  The thing that would interest me greatly would be zfs on linux – with Sun owned by IBM and their investment in Linux it might lead to a reconcilation between Sun and Linux licenses.  While Solaris has come a long way in the last couple years, but the only reason why I use solaris is zfs.  Linux is still a much more flexible, effective and deployable solution. 

 

Very useful Windows desktop icon organiser by Stardock. Review from Lifehacker.

According to this thread, if you need to use the linux-image-virtual package on ubuntu then it only supports the “bus logic” scsi controller with ESX.

I was trying a Windows Live game on Steam yesterday and got the above error. After a lot of googling I discovered that I needed to install Game for Windows Live. There is version 1.2 and 2.0. Once this were installed the game run correctly.

I tried several methods last night including Unetbootin, and this is the one that worked best.

• Using Windows to prepare USB install of Ubuntu 8.10
• Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting

Basically copy the ISO on the USB root directory, add vmlinuz and initrd.gz from main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/. Then add syslinux.cfg with:

default vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.gz

If you have boot problems you might also need to run install-mbr /dev/sda from the mbr package.

I keep smacking into this issue. So a couple notes to myself for future reference.

• Tinydns / DJBDNS on Ubuntu Hardy Heron
• upstart breaks inittab

Before install touch /etc/inittab and afterwards add this to /etc/event.d/svscan:

start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

stop on runlevel 0
stop on runlevel 1
stop on runlevel 6

respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot