A lot of newer vehicles have USB sockets for plugging in your music collection. The default FAT32 format that Ubuntu does in the disk manager just doesn't cut it. In many cases, the vehicle may not even be able to read a stick formatted with the default Ubuntu method.
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So since installing Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal, I've been plagued by strange authentication errors. I thought for some time that it was related to my use of LDAP for domain admin authentication, but it turns out it's more devious. I run Gnome3. That means when I launch something like Synaptic I typically pop the menu up, type in "syna" and hit enter to launch the app.
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Here's a problem that has driven me crazy over the past year or so. First, the Way it's Supposed to Work. In Ubuntu, you don't typically have a "root" user password. If a user needs to do something that requires administrator rights, they are placed in the "admin" group and when they try to say - edit the global network settings - it asks them for their password and uses "sudo" to do whatever they want.
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Here's a little tip for you. If you run Ubuntu and decide to make a quick backup of your home directory using cp -R -d, make sure to "eject" any network shares you mounted using the file browser.
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When you talk about desktop security there's a lot that can be discussed: user permissions, firewalls, etc. Here's a little step that gets overlooked quite a bit, but can go a long way to preventing a direct attack against your destkops. In Ubuntu Desktop, you can deploy custom Gnome settings that override the defaults by dropping an XML file at: /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory/%gconf-tree.xml I use Puppet to deploy these settings to all of my Linux desktops. If you're from the Windows world, this is like using group policy, but with much more granular control. Here's a sample of a few things you should change:
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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.
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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.
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I've just upgraded my computer to a new quad-core AMD64 system and did a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic 64 bit. My old tutorial on getting Tweetdeck working still mostly applies. My old dual-core AMD64 that was about 3 years old worked just fine with Adobe AIR, but with a newer AMD 64 CPU, Adobe AIR will segmentation fault when you try to run the application installer. This means you can install AIR just fine, but you can't install any programs that actually USE it. I've tested versions of AIR including 1.5, 1.5.1 and the latest 1.5.2 and all three segfault running the installer. HOWEVER - the Beta 2 of AIR works just fine with it. Now, if you previously had TweetDeck working, you might need to uninstall anything AIR, including AIR, then delete the ~/.appdata directory. Afterwards, do a fresh install of Air followed by Tweetdeck. I had originally copied my home directory from my old computer and then tried to reinstall Tweetdeck and Tweetdeck initially complained that it wouldn't run on my computer.
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If you are trying to run an enterprise in Linux, one of the key components needed is a way to automatically deploy and configure Linux on the desktop. With this you can also make a memory test utility available over the network.
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For security reasons, many businesses are completely disabling USB storage devices on the computers at work. Particularly if you are like me and work with healthcare information, it's doubly important that not only no one can bring in a virus, but that they also can't leave with any private information. In Linux the risk of viruses are small to nonexistent, however USB sticks automatically mount for reading and writing regardless. There's an easy way in recent Ubuntu distributions to disable USB storage devices. Simply blacklist the kernel driver: sudo echo "blacklist usb-storage" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf After that, nobody can use a USB memory stick in that computer, but still allows the administrator(s) to manually load the module and use it. I'll be giving more enterprise Linux tips in the near future if all goes well.
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