Wai! manga about Ubuntu!

Well, I couldn’t let such reconciliation of my hobbies go uncommented, its not often that I get to have a post go simultaneously in the Ubuntu and Anime/Mange categories, its really nicely drawn as well.

Fixing the Nautilus garbage bin again

Usability bugs are nasty, they tend to be a major point of frustration for novice users, yet their importance is sometimes hard to explain to developers.

An even worse situation occurs when such bugs, once worked around, come back to bite you in a later software release because of a lack of developer foresight.

I am going to discuss a work around for a bug I’ve already discussed in the past. I’m going to skip going into the details of how this bug arises, please read the previous post for those.

Sound problems on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Well, I wanted to describe some of the relatively minor sound problems I’ve encountered after upgrading to Hardy, while giving some kind of an overview of how things are with audio and Linux and why are we seeing problems with this release, but this article does a much better job at it then I could.

Very briefly, the solution for my audio problems was to set all the options to “PulseAudio Sound Server” in the “Sound Preferences” administration applet, and install the “libflashsupport” package.

Update: Another class of applications that is affected by the switch to PulseAudio is those appications that use the SDL library. Thos can be configured to use PulseAudio exclusively by installing the “libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio” package and making sure no other “libsdl1.2debian-*” package is installed.

Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” upgrade notes

As experienced computer users know, the fresh-released versions of products are typically not very stable and reliable. It takes a few months (Typically until the x.1 version is released) for the product to really stabilize and become production-ready. This also seems to be true for Free and Open-Source software, though the maturing rate seems to be faster.

Knowing that, I typically wait a couple of months after an Ubuntu release before I take the time to upgrade. When it comes to Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, a further reason not to upgrade was provided by the fact that up until now it didn’t include a stable version of Firefox.

I finally decided to take the time and upgrade the Ubuntu version on my personal home computer yesterday. The upgrade didn’t went as smoothly as I hoped it would. Most of the issues can be blamed on the manual tweaks I’ve made to my system. Not all, however.

Below is a list of the issues I’ve encountered during and after the upgrade, and the solutions I came up with (when applicable).

Wuala: True Peer-to-Peer file system

The was a live-journal post linked from linuxtoday today discussing Wuala, which seems to be a network file system which uses Peer-to-Peer technology to pool together the storage of multiple client machines.

This is an idea I’ve been toying with in my head for quite some time now. Ever since the idea of grid-computing became popular, I’ve been waiting for some kind of a grid file system to emerge, one that would allow one to tap into the unused storage resources on the network that typically reside on the local hard-drives of servers and workstations, and avoid having to invest in large expensive central storage systems.

There are several products that claim to be grid file systems, notable examples are lustre and InterMezzo, however, these seem to built around the idea of building a central storage out of a large number of dedicated machines rather then having the storage distributed across all the machines in the network.

Wuala is an interesting piece of software, and if to judge by the screen shots in the live-journal post, its available fur Ubuntu, I’ll be trying it out soon, on the very least, this could be a nice backup solution.