Why bother with a locked-in iPad if you're a true technohead, when you can install Ubuntu on the Archos 9 Internet Tablet? The Archos 9 has several flaws, mostly surrounding the installed software. People say it's slow, but really with something other than "Windows Starter" it's actually pretty peppy. The internal hard drive is a bit slow, so I replaced mine with an SSD so I don't have to worry about a physically spinning drive anymore in my hands, and I get better performance.

Installing Ubuntu on it isn't for the weak kneed, but it's not that tough either. Here's a step by step to get you up and running.

I stumbled on a little bug today while trying to use my Sennheiser USB headset adapter with my Sennheiser headphones. I plugged them in and got nothing...

The device would appear in System - Preferences - Sound, but on the available output tab it didn't show.

A bit more probing found that Alsa worked just fine with it.

Finally I determined that Pulseaudio wouldn't fully recognize the headset after it was plugged in until it was restarted. To do this you can either log out and log back in or type in the following commands at a console:

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --check

Be sure you don't have any software open that's using the speakers or mic at the time or that program will likely freeze up.

Anyone else see anything wrong with this screenshot?

Yeah, weird, huh? For some reason it was reporting my disk usage as a NEGATIVE number. I've never seen that before. I found it because ZoneMinder had stopped recording for some reason - it thought I was out of hard disk space when in actuality there's very little drive used. A quick reboot fixed the problem. Lucky for me there's nothing important on this box - it's simply for zoneminder and watching Hulu or streaming my MythTV recordings to my bedroom. I think this happened after our power spike and outage the other day. This particular PC isn't on a UPS.

Well, it seems they still haven't made any progress at making the Compiz graphics effects work on a multi-GPU setup, but you can run two X screens each using two monitors and keep the Compiz effects. If you want to grab and drag windows across all four monitors, you lose the cool graphics effects.

Here's what it might look like though using four monitors of three different sizes using xinerama without Compiz on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 with two nVidia cards, each driving two monitors:

I decided it was time to place a PXE boot install image on my network for installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid desktops. For the most part everything went as expected (see this post) but during the install I got an error that "restricted/binary-amd64/Packages was corrupt".

It turns out there are no restricted packages on the alternate installer image, and the lack of an empty "Packages" file at "/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-amd64" where the networked install image is located was causing it to bomb.

Simply doing

touch Packages

in that shared directory within the install image seems to have fixed the issue. For some reason the fact that the Packages.gz ungzips into a zero byte file was throwing it, but having an already existing zero byte file seemed to fix it.

I just did a security patch upgrade on an Ubuntu Karmic server. I know, Lucid is out but I'm not ready to jump on that bandwagon with any more servers yet.

Immediately after the upgrade, I noticed that SSH logins took literally forever and were followed by:

timeout in locking authority file: .Xauthority

It turns out that something with this latest upgrade caused my home directory to not be writable by... me. This was definitely not a problem before the upgrade. I'm assuming it will only affect those using encrypted home directories.

Quick fix: after logging in as myself, I did:

sudo chmod u+w /home/[yourdirectory]

It didn't have to be done recursively because all of the subdirectories had retained their permissions.

My new car tag finally arrived... Amazingly, even in West Virginia, a plate with "LINUX" on it was taken, so I got mildly creative and used a one instead of an I.

And it's doubly applicable... Mercedes-Benz uses Linux as a development platform when writing the Electronic Stability Program (ESP) software that goes in their cars, among other things.

Now if I can just find my plate cover... it says "Will Work For Bandwidth".

I've just finished reading Funambol Mobile Open Source by Stefano Fornari. I already knew a good deal about Funambol servers and setup prior to reading this book, but I have to say this book would definitely have made my own learning curve a lot easier.

The author does a good job of providing both a beginners perspective and touching lightly on some advanced topics. It begins by chronicling the installation and setup of a fictional user "Maria" as she goes from simply syncing her local desktop to a newly installed Funambol server to a full fledged enterprise environment with hundreds of users.

It covers both Windows and Linux installations and several mobile devices as well including both the Blackberry and the iPhone. It doesn't go into great detail on any one mobile device. I would have preferred to see a bit more detail regarding both the Blackberry and the iPhone considering their prevalence in the market, but he does a good job of at least getting you started with both.

If you've installed Ubuntu 10.04 you may have noticed that it boots amazingly fast, but on some installations the time after you login until the desktop is visible may take 5 to 10 seconds.

I found that there were several startup applications by default that I had no need for. Disabling those applications will cause your desktop to be available nearly instantly, meaning with the new improved boot times, I can actually turn on my computer and be sitting at a working desktop in about 7 seconds (not counting BIOS post time of 23 seconds.)

And that's not a resume - that's a fresh boot.

How do you do that last bit of speedup? After logging into Ubuntu, go to System - Preferences - Startup Applications.

Here's a list of what I disabled, your mileage may vary:

Bluetooth Manager (I don't have a bluetooth device in this PC)
Evolution Alarm Notifier (I run Thunderbird)
Personal File Sharing
Remote Desktop Server
Ubuntu One
Visual Assistance

In addition to doing that, I added in a few other programs such as Rhythmbox to start when I log in. Even with those extra apps added, it shaved several seconds off my login time.

I just upgraded first my desktop and then my primary domain / LDAP server to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Everything went very smooth on the desktop, but I did it as a full install onto a new 64 GB SSD hard drive, with a HDD for the /home directory.

The server however broke phpldapadmin which was installed, and caused all my custom puppet scripts to fail due to bad design based on poor documentation. As usual, they moved my cheese. That's why I wait for the LTS upgrades for servers, which is what it's designed for anyway.

On the desktop though I must say - the reviews don't do it justice. I was reading the news on the net about what changed and thinking "well that's not much." Boy was I wrong! There's a lot of little attention to detail and just plain... smoothness to it that wasn't there before. It's truly a polished release. The only issue I had was related to using Thunderbird. They package Thunderbird, but they don't allow installation of Lightning from a package because there's no 64 bit version in the package system. I had to find the beta 64 bit version of Lightning and manually install it.

And as for all the hubub over switching to Yahoo as the default search engine - it apparently didn't happen. But the darn window buttons were annoying before I switched them back to what I'm used to.