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revford blog
Let's see you get out of here!
FSF Campaign on Secure/Restricted Boot
Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:19:12 GMT
Another important campaign over at the Free Software Foundation, a new security feature that Microsoft are pushing for PCs marked as Windows 8 compatible could lock you out from installing any alternative OS.
Alternatives including GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Slackware or Ubuntu and really really alternative OS choices like Haiku, ReactOS and FreeDOS. All projects I have a special love for.
Implemented correctly this doesn't have to screw people over, so the FSF are rallying people to raise awareness of the issue and make the community voice heard by the hardware manufacturers.
Please take the time to have a read of the link below, and if you give a fuck, please sign.
Audio Production on Linux
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:50:06 GMT
Some info that could be handy to Ian and Olly, an interesting article on audio production on Ubuntu.
Linux Music Workflow: Switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu with Kim Cascone
Special for David, how to build a driver for your WiFi
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:15:49 GMT
David's laptop has WiFi based on a recent Atheros chip set, not supported out of the box on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), so building a driver from the source is required.
Make sure the default Atheros driver, that doesn't support this hardware, is disabled first. From the menus choose System > Administration > Hardware Drivers and untick the Atheros drivers there.
Download the latest source of the required driver, madwifi, here:
MadWifi subversion snapshot archive
Just find the latest version of madwifi-hal, download it, untar it and issue the commands make then sudo make install in the extracted directory. Reboot and it's done.
A better driver built into the kernel is coming soon, so you won't have to keep building your own driver for long.
Powered By Ubuntu Stickers
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:20:16 GMT
Thanks to a tip on the Ubuntu UK mailing list for this one.
You can get a strip of four "Powered By Ubuntu" computer case stickers for free. Here in the UK they are available from The Linux Emporium in Birmingham.
The Linux Emporium is also a good place to get Linux compatible networking gear, which can be a problem with some suppliers as they don't specify which chips are used in their wireless hardware.
HTML Validator now working on Hardy
Thu, 22 May 2008 14:40:52 GMT
Another unbork for Ubuntu Hardy, this time getting the HTML Validator extension for Firefox working.
This was initially double borked in Hardy, once because of the move from Firefox 2 to a beta version of Firefox 3, then again by moving from libstdc++ 5 to libstdc++ 6.
After some fiddling, updating to the latest version from the extension's home page, then installing the following packages sorts out the problem:
sudo aptitude install libstdc++5 libxul-dev
Still two problems to sort out:
- Liferea, the feed reader spins up 100% of the spare CPU time at random.
- Can't receive files using bluetooth
Unborking Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy
Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:25:45 GMT
Well, after a few days of finding things not working in Hardy, I've been and sorted a few out.
Hardy has been a real pain. It was temping to just say bollocks to it and install Debian, but I decided to push on and see if I could sort these problems out.
Broadcom WiFi was slow and unreliable
This was down to defaulting to the Open Source Broadcom driver, which is cripplingly slow and seemed to
just plain stop in the middle of transfers. Hopefully this will get better in future, but it's no use
to me at the moment.
Simple solution was to disable the Free driver, then reinstall NDISwrapper. Speeds climbed back from 60kB/s to 700kB/s on FTPs about the LAN. Much better.
Useful info on stopping the OSS driver and re-enabling NDISwrapper here:
NDISwrapper In Hardy Heron
MPlayer plug-in for Firefox 3
Well, after upgrading to Hardy, it didn't work. I tried disabling the totem plugins using the nice
new plugins interface in Firefox 3, via Tools > Add-ons then click Plugins, but no luck.
The new hiding place for mozilla plugins on Hardy is /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins so I backed up and removed the Totem plugins and restarted Firefox, worked like magic.
Open a terminal and enter these commands:
$ cd /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/ $ sudo mkdir plugins-disabled $ sudo mv plugins/libtotem-* plugins-disabled/
Running anything with sudo will ask for your password the first time, this is normal, don't worry about it.
Restart Firefox and all is well.
Liferea uses up all available CPU time
Well, still not found a satisfactory fix for this one. Restarting the app seems to fix it. It only goes
ape on startup and then not every time.
If it goes loopy on startup, shut it down and restart it.
Updated to Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy"
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:36 GMT
Well, Saturday I had some clear headed time and decided to try to update my laptop from Gusty to Hardy. For anyone not familiar with the Ubuntu Linux version scheme, it's alphabetical, so version G to H. The numbers are the release date, 8 for 2008 and 04 for April.
The update was fairly smooth, it knocked out my WiFi card and I had to download a new driver, which was quick and painless to fix.
Also it's borked my feed reader, Liferea, which now spins away using over 90% of the CPU time. A pain in the arse.
I've not found any great new features yet, so it's not much in the way of an upgrade. The good feature of this release is it's listed for Long Term Support. So I should be able to go for quite some time now with regular security updates and no need to upgrade the whole distro.
Also they swapped the stable Firefox 2 for a beta version of Firefox 3. This seems like a bad idea to ship beta software as one of the core apps. Hopefully this will be updated to a final version as soon as one becomes available.
A strange combination of this new browser and some lib changes to Hardy (Debian has this also) means that my favourite HTML Validator extension no longer works, which is a real pain in the arse.
So two strikes down for Hardy, I've lost two of my most commonly used tools and gained nothing much in return.
My advice is to wait until they shake the last few bugs out of Hardy before you upgrade.
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