Posted April 7, 2011
I'm not sure when it happened, but yesterday and part of today I found
myself in the company of a blinking cursor. Normally blinking cursors are
not a big problem. The thing is, however, that when I'm writing code, or
text in my favorite text editor, I want to know where the next character I
type will land on the screen. With this blinking cursor, it seemed my mind
started to blink in unison. Not very useful when trying to write.
Apperantly in a previous update, Vim (or probably the Terminal) started
respecting the preferences for the blinking cursor. It could also be that
I was experimenting with a setting for the $TERM environment variable. A
few days ago I set it to gnome-256color which enabled 256 colors in the
Terminal, which I tried to get for some time now.
Now how to get rid of this blinking cursor. Goto System >
Preferences > Keyboard > General > Cursor Blinking. Uncheck
the checkbox named Cursor blinks in text fields.
This works in Ubuntu 10.10 and probably in other versions as well.
Posted November 11, 2010
Sometimes you find packages on your Ubuntu box and you don't know how they got
there. This happens often with automatically installed programs. To find the packages that
require (or recommend) another package, you can use the aptitude why command.
Below you see (an edited) example session where I needed to find the program
that used a package.
$ aptitude search timidity
i A timidity - Software sound renderer...
i A timidity-daemon - runs TiMidity++ as a sy...
In this example I first search for the package that I didn't know and wanted to
remove. You can see from the uppercase A that this package is installed
automatically. First I need to know if the program is system critical. So I use
the why command to find the packages that use this package.
$ aptitude why timidity
i prboom Recommends timidity
The prboom package isn't automatically installed. It's a game that I haven't
played for a few years, so I remove it.
$ aptitude remove prboom
And we're done.
Posted April 30, 2010
Canonical just released the latest version of Ubuntu.
I haven't tried it yet, but will when things calm down here. At the end of
April and the beginning of May there are a lot of parties in the Netherlands,
e.g. Queensday and Liberation Day.
Posted September 25, 2009
I really don't like that the Ubuntu update-manager opens a window when it finds
that there updates that can be installed. In older versions Ubuntu showed a
small icon in the top panel.
Apparently Ubuntu still allows you to do that, but you will need to call the
following command:
gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
This will not add the icon to the top panel directly. You will need to wait for
the next update for that.
Posted November 3, 2008
I installed the new Ubuntu 8.10 on friday. The thing
is I have no idea what the differences with the previous version are. So
let's take a look at the release notes and changelogs.
According to the changelog this new version of Ubuntu uses the new Gnome
2.24.
The release notes of Gnome
explain some of the new features.
The version of Gimp is also updated to 2.6. This new
version of Gimp has changed a whole lot.
Release notes are here.
I changed my font rendering to use Subpixel smoothing. I'm not sure. I
think I like it. The text on my screen looks a lot better now. It's
pretty.
Another big change is the user switcher. The user switcher is combined
with the shutdown button and your IM status. You can set your IM
status with the user switcher applet.
A lot of applications have been updated to new versions. Perl is now
version v5.10.0, which is the newest version. This version of perl has
a lot of nice new features,
including named captures, a switch statement, state variables, defined-or
operator and smart matching.
I had no problems with this update, except for mailman. That package was
only installed because I wanted to test it out for my production server.
But it seems the installation files have a problem because I did not have
any lists created, yet. This was not a big problem; I only had to run
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade.
All in all a nice and simple upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10, without any huge
problems.
Posted January 30, 2008
My laptop (a Toshiba Sattelite Pro L40) has working sound now! It started woking after I added the following two lines to the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
options snd-card-0 index=0 model=3stack
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=3stack
The problem was that the audio was working when I first started the laptop, but
it would stop when I used the volume mixer. Changing the volume did something that made the audio stop working.
Posted January 30, 2008
I have installed Ubuntu Linux on my laptop. This is the second time that I
tried installing linux on my laptop. The first time
there were all kinds of problems with unsupported hardware.
When I installed Ubuntu yesterday, everything worked (except for Wireless).
After a bit of searching I found a solution in ndiswrapper. I'm not that
happy with this, because it is using Windows drivers. I'm waiting for the
release of the new madwifi wireless drivers, which I hope
will fix this problem.