This new blog will be where I post about anything that interests me, and that will certainly include Ubuntu and Linux in a major way, I’d love if you would visit my new blog and subscribe to my posts, they won’t all be about Ubuntu but many of them will be.

I’ve had a great time blogging here, and think I’ve helped some people, It’s always lovely to be linked from other blogs and get comments saying that a tip helped someone. I’m going to leave the site up there, because some of the posts are still getting 40 to 50 hits a day, but I would be surprised if there are any more posts.

So in conclusion, visit me at www.shanetuohy.com, follow me on twitter too, shanetuohy.

That’s all folks!

Thanks for all your support,

Shane

After my bad experience last week after upgrading directly from Hardy to Intrepid I burnt an ISO of the release candidate and did a fresh install. The results were much better!

Installation was fine, although I wouldn’t use the migration assistant, it made my install hang the 1st time around.

Here are my thoughts on the latest release of this suberb Linux distro.

• My Wifi status LED now works! Since I have been using Ubuntu on Dell machines, the Wifi LED has never worked, now it does, a small detail, but its nice to see.
• Hibernating works! Anyone who knows a little about Linux will know that one of the biggest problems with it is trying to get the hibernate functionality of laptops working reliably. It is very difficult to know in which order to disable and re-enable all devices, so it is great that they have it working, at least on my machine.

These are a couple of little personal things that I have noticed and am very happy about, but on a more general note, how does the new OS work? Is it a worthwhile upgrade?

The first thing most people will notice is the new look, similar to the old one, but the menu bars are a little more refined, more subtle and look much nicer.

The default look is definitely nicer than in Hardy, it looks quite slick and futuristic.

The network manager has been improved, and in general will detect the type of encryption required by the network, managing settings have also been given an overhaul and work quite well. It picked up the settings for both my university wifi network and home network, prompting me for my key and then disappearing again, connecting automatically. I still prefer to use Wicd though!

You can now manage 3G modems, which is great and increases compatibility with alot of devices.

Another big improvement is Nautilus, the default file manager.

As you can see from my screen shot, you can now have tabbed browsing within your file manager! Just like in Firefox, its a great idea.

Also, beside each mounted drive there is an eject arrow, which can be used to eject the medium. Which is a nice touch.

You can now also switch session and have multiple users logged in at one time. Another good progression

Something that people are raving about with the new release is the inclusion of a BBC iPlayer compatible plugin, which fixes an annoying problem. Not for me though, as I don’t live in the UK!

Recently there has been a lot of talk about security for files on your laptop, especially since the TSA in the US started searching peoples laptops for no reason. The latest Ubuntu release provides for paranoid types by implementing an encrypted directory in your home folder. If you ask me, this is overkill, but it’ll keep some tinfoil hat wearers happy!

As usual for Ubuntu, ntfs file system support is excellent, I have had no problems accessing my Windows hard drive partition, it is happy to appear on a network, and play nice with everybody.

Overall I have found the new Ubuntu release, despite a few early development version hiccups, to be very impressive. When I began using Ubuntu a couple of years ago with 6.06 Dapper Drake, it felt a little shaky, and it seemed as if, if you scratched past the surface, it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. This release is stable, modern, and has the feel of a reliable, fast OS.

The new graphical touches give it a polished look, and the restricted drivers module, as well as the easy codec installer, make Ubuntu the perfect distro for beginners, installation is almost insultingly easy too.

To brand this as a beginners distro would be foolish however, it has all the customisability and flexibility that long time Linux users will love, built around a very solid base with second to none hardware compatibility and universal support from most of the Linux community.

A great distro. Go get it now!

http://ubuntu.com/getubuntu

I’ll be leaving all of these old posts on here for archival purposes, so that they’ll be accessible, cos there is a lot of handy info in them.

Fair enough, so I changed permissions on this folder to be writable by all. Still no luck.

After about a month of being bloody pissed off with this arrangement, but unable to fix it, I happened across a tip that suggests deleting the folder and recreating it. So simple, but it might just work….

And it did! So if you’re having the same problem, heres how to go about fixing it.

1. Open a terminal and run the command “cd .config”

2. Now, check the permissions of the files in this folder, run “ls -l”, this lists the properties of the files within the current folder. We’re interested in the properties of the “autostart” folder.

3. Find the line corresponding to the autostart folder, it will be the top one, or very close to it, now, after the series of letters ( e.g rwrx–r–rw etc.) it should list your username as the owner of the folder. If you see ‘root’ here, this may be your problem, you can remedy it by running the following command,

“sudo chown username autostart” (Replacing ‘username’ with your username obviously).

4. Try the sessions manager again, if it doesn’t fix your problem, we’ll move onto the next step.

5. Once again navigate to the .config folder, this time we’re going to delete the folder and recreate it, so run the following command, it will do both operations at once.

“sudo rm autostart;mkdir autostart”

6. This should fix the problem, so give sessions manager a go again.

Let me know if this works for you, it drove me crazy for a while, hopefully you found this post before it does the same to you!

BTW – I’ve typed this whole post without looking at the keyboard once, my own very blunt way of teaching myself to touch type! Its a pain in the arse, but I’ll let you know if it works!

Thats a picture of a graph of my CPU usage.

The high bit was compiz.real or Xorg, I’m not sure, ‘top’ and System Monitor tell me different things, hogging my CPU big time. It happens at random intervals and is really annoying.

It has to be a compiz problem cos if i run ‘metacity –replace’, the usage goes back to normal, as can be seen on the graph.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any known solution?!

I should mention that I’ve got an Intel integrated graphics card – the 945gma I believe, so unfortunately, the nVidia fixes posted don’t really help!

—–EDIT——-

Just thought I’d stick up some new screenshots of what the top command outputs, and what the system monitor outputs

The cool thing about it is that you specify exactly how it works, by creating and editing a file in your home directory called .conkyrc , this file is a little hard to understand so you’re better to (like I did) use a pre configured file, I’ll post mine here, along with a screenshot. It makes your desktop look seriously l33t!

.conkyrc

Yup! Hardy CD’s!