Ubuntu

For a long time, in the olden days, I ran Xubuntu – mainly because I loved the simplicity of the desktop (and also because it was a lot lighter on my machine, a Thinkpad T40, than GNOME. And I just have no love for KDE). Then some changes were made to the menu system (or the way to edit it) which annoyed the hell out of me – that combined with a new, more powerful machine, I decided to switch to GNOME, which I’ve been running for a couple of years....

Percona XtraBackup is an open-source hot backup utility for MySQL that doesn’t lock your database during the backup. It can back up data from InnoDB, XtraDB, and MyISAM tables on MySQL 5.0 and newer servers, and it has many advanced features. Commercial support contracts are available. For a high-level overview of the features, including a feature comparison, please see the XtraBackup homepage. Luckily installing XtraBackup is pretty easy...

After upgrading to Natty Narwhal I couldn’t connect to my Linux based jump host (connected via VPN): OpenSSH_5.8p1 Debian-1ubuntu2, OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010 debug1: Reading configuration data /home/alj/.ssh/config debug1: Applying options for * debug1: Applying options for smallpox.xxx.dk debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug1: Applying options for * debug1: Connecting to smallpox.xxx.dk [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] port 22. debug1: Connection established. debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_rsa type -1 debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_rsa-cert type -1 debug1: identity file /home/alj/....

In the pre-10.04 days it was possible to make a Gobi 200(0) modem work by installing gobi_loader and using it to load the firmware for the modem. However, with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 (which sports a shiny 2.6.35 kernel) gobi_loader stopped working. Because gobi_loader (according to the homepage) does not support 2.6.32+ I stopped caring and used my Huwai stick instead. Recently one my colleagues noted that after upgrading to 10....

Update: This fix is now documented in the Ubuntu Wiki After upgrading to Natty alpha 2 clicking left+right mouse no longer worked as middle mouse button (also known as Emulate3Buttons). Since version 10.04 (and for real since 10.10) Ubuntu no longer sports a xorg.conf file; all configuration is done through udev and evdev – for some reason the “mouse” (track point) in my HP Elitebook 2540p is detected as a three button mouse...

It’s been a while since I last had to run Windows on my laptop; back then I used Ext2 Installable File System For Windows to access data on my Linux-formated partitions. In the meantime a few things have changed: Windows 7 and Ubuntu formating ext3 with a inode size of 256 – none of these are supported by ext3 ifs. Ext2read supports Windows 7 (as well as ext4 and LVM2) but it’s more like a file browser and does not support assigning drive letters to Linux filesystems and since my /home is formatted with XFS it does not help me anyway....

Just a quick heads-up. Virtualbox does not yet officially support Xorg 1.9 (which is shipped with Ubuntu 10.10). According to this ticket the problem will be fixed in 3.2.10. In the meantime, try you your luck which with this unsupported Additions build; it didn’t work for me though....

Let’s say you have three disks but you wish to share with Samba or NFS clients. Of course you could just mount the disks on three separate mount points and export those. Or you could mount the three disks on three mount points inside the same directory and export the parent directory. The problem with both solutions is you have to “balance” the data among the disks – and it will make navigating your TViX, WDTV or Popcorn more annoying....