We have Ubuntu installed on two of the machines at home and recently, after losing a Windows restore disc, I suggested installing Ubuntu 10.04 on her Dell 1545 after my suggestion.
As installations go, it was relatively painless – certainly better than reinstalling Windows. Don’t get me wrong, Dell is better than most in this respect as they gave us OEM install discs for Windows Vista, bundled software and the drivers. As strait forward as this is with Dell’s resource CD (it mostly tells you what you need), it doesn’t know any more than what model you own. This is problematic with the wireless card for example as there are two revision states and the drivers are incompatible with each other – one crashes Windows.
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I have been away for nearly five months. In that time my Aspire One’s battery has, unsurprisingly, gone totally flat. However it wont charge. This device’s power supply seems to have issues, it has gone through more fuses than any device I’ve had. The battery life is not really good enough for a netbook (mind you my Samsung NC-10 doesn’t get much over six hours after the six months I’ve owned it). The weirdest thing is that it will not turn on when the battery is connected – on mains power with no battery it boots fine.
So I stuck the battery in after it was booted and it charges… I’m at a loss to explain this. I’d have thought charging was carried out at hardware level.
February 27, 2010 – 11:00 am
I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth but I am overseas for a while. I’ll be updating when I get back.
January 2, 2010 – 1:54 am
Has anyone else noticed a large amount of ping backs to link farms from Planet Ubuntu feeds over the last few days? I’m getting a fair few. I’d give an example but if I link to a site that takes my posts from a syndicated site and creates posts that are syndicated on other sites I might create some sort of perpetual motion blog post and consume the Internet (it might seem far fetched but what if Robert Morris had stopped to think).
I find these objectionable though – they appear to be WordPress and I guess are using a plugin to pull feeds in and publish as articles. They’re not as bad as flat out plagiarism – which I’ve experienced. Mind you even that isn’t the worst, I once wrote a howto which was CC licensed and I realised it had been ripped off when someone posted a comment on it suggesting (quite strongly) that I had taken it from the thief!
So it occurs to me that maybe this is a WordPress thing. Then again maybe not. Like so many of us I get stuck in my ways and WordPress is like a pair of comfy shoes. Maybe I should try a new platform, so I wondered what was popular out there in Ubuntu-land.
I’ve tried Drupal (I don’t like it, sorry Emma), Serendipity and Pixie (I quite liked that but baulked at the theming system). Mind you I also have quite a lot of time to myself over the next four months, maybe I should roll my own, I’ve hacked around in PHP but have never developed a large project using it.
So let me know, suggestions on a postcard. Maybe just a comment here will suffice.
January 2, 2010 – 1:19 am
After writing documentation for many years, once in a while I come across a post on the Internet that makes me wonder why I bother. So I thought we could turn it into a game.
Basically it’s like spot the difference, see how many things you can spot that are wrong with it and post them here.
Here is the post in question and it is a cracker. I can think of several things that are wrong with it but see what you can come up with. Here’s a starting hint – man visudo.
