JDPFu.com 2025

$99 mini-netbook with an ARM processor

Buy It Today!

The device runs either WindowsCE or Android, but I imagine an Ubuntu-on-ARM or Maemo5 distro will work too. For $99, I’d buy one of these devices today, on a whim. If they were in Walmart or Target, then I’d buy 2 of them. Seriously, my neighbor could replace her $700 laptop with this for all the email and surfing she does AND be safer on the internet.

Add an 8GB class 6 SDHC and you’re ready for most home internet users.

Like many people, I recently updated my main desktop Ubuntu installation to 10.04, Lucid Lynx. As a long time Linux user, we’re used to some special keystrokes to force the system to do things. Keystrokes like:

• Reboot – {cntl}-{alt}-{del}
• Restart X/Windows – {cntl}-{alt}-{backspace}

The Solution

Many of us prefer to use Open Office, OO, for our productivity applications, but most of the people we deal with do not. OO does a good job of supporting MS-Office file formats, but it isn’t perfect. I’ve caused format issues with my team and clients because I chose to use OO instead of booting MS-Windows just to run MS-Office. They were not happy that my touching the files screwed up all the paragraph formating or worse.

If your team uses commenting or any other advanced feedback features in MS-Office, give up on OO and load MS-Office for those times when you must use MS-Office.

Enough was enough for me. I’ve already paid for the MS-Office license, so running it under Linux would be ideal for me. WINE to the rescue. Below I’ll talk through the easy installation process and let you know what to expect in each of the apps after you get MS-Office loaded.

Xen as a Dom0 is not supported in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) by Canonical. Both Canonical and Redhat have decided to get behind the KVM virtualization method instead. I think this was a choice driven by the required maintenance effort, since KVM hooks have been in the baseline Linux Kernel for about a year and Xen inclusion into the Linux kernel doesn’t seem likely at any point in the future. Supporting Xen kernels is just too tough.

Solved – Ubuntu 10.04 Dual Monitor with nVidia Driver

With every Ubuntu OS version update, we risk losing our dual monitor support. Through a cockpit error, I found myself performing a fresh install of Ubuntu this week. After getting all the important things working, it was time to correct the dual monitor issue.

If you are running any version of Lucid Lynx with X/Windows, these instructions should work. There is nothing specific to Gnome or KDE or any other environment here. Heck, they may work for older releases too.

My Setup

What’s that saying? Some days you eat the bear and other days the bear eats you.
Or perhaps Stupid is as stupid does fits.

Ooops is something you never want to hear your system/network admin say. I’ve heard it said elsewhere and then watched as 200+ NASA servers all started rebooting. No time to save your work. No time to do anything before the screen flickers and a bios screen is displayed.

Today, I said, “ooops.”

I came across another Top 12 List today. This one is about Live System Monitoring Tools# for Linux.

We use most of them almost daily.

Here’s the list from the article.

I watch lots of cloud computing articles. If you follow this blog, you know that I’m not a fan of outside cloud computing, but I love internal virtualization, an internal enterprise cloud, if you will.

Let’s look at some real-world pricing.

A brilliant article Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Being a System Admin, I Learned from Superman-

If you are an admin, remember that with great power comes great responsibility. I like Spiderman too. ;)

The behavior of Samba network shares changed with a recent patch. There was a security issue where unix extensions and softlinks created undefined behavior. I use softlinks, perhaps more than I should, for convenience.

Anyway, after I completely my normal weekly system patching today, I noticed that my samba shares weren’t working below a softlink from my HOME directory. I keep most things down this link since it points to the external RAID5 array, huge and fast. Fortunately, the security announcement included the settings to make it work again.

Just add

unix extensions = no

to the [Global] section of your smb.conf file.

Worked for me.