If any ones else actually reads this blog, sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy with school and work. Those of you looking for the media partition install, I'll email you soon.

Though I am now writing because I'll have another laptop to write about. My wife is getting a new iMac to do her design work on, so I'll be getting her old little iBook. Yes the 500Mhz little white iBook.

I'll be trying xubuntu on it, but since that doesn't get updated with the main repos now, i may end up going fully with fedora or yellow dog or a more friendly PPC distro.

If anyone has any suggestions for me, just post a response or email me through the contact me page.

I recently had the opportunity, installed through Automatix, to try out the new Flash Player 9 beta. I know some of you are purists and feel that everything should be free software. Though I respect your opinion and wish it was that easy, I am willing to accept some proprietary programs on my machine.

That being said, I have several sites I like that use Flash, mainly for video. The main ones being homestarruner.com, youtube, and ABC for the online full shows of Lost (our cable is too expensive here and that's about all I want to watch anyway).

The first thing is a pretty basic thing that most people know about. It isn't really an Edgy problem but apparently I didn't mention it before. The Synaptic touchpad is too touchy with the tap to click function. So you fix it by typing this into /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the "Synaptic Touchpad" area:

Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

The next problem I don't quite understand. For some reason when I installed Edgy, the included Firefox couldn't handle flash (with the flash plugin installed). It just crashed every time I tried to go to Homestarrunner. The fix is pretty easy though, you just add this line to /etc/firefox/firefoxrc :

This is the first time I have gotten any version of Linux to hibernate on my laptop. Good ol' Edgy works though, I tested it this afternoon. I just told it to hibernate, it took about the same time as windows to do it. Then when I restarted, it brought up a log in screen like if it was coming back from a screen saver. The boot up took a little less time even. I am really impressed with edgy. Say what you will about the problems, I know I saw my share, but this makes Ubuntu all the more usable on my laptop as the main and, possibly in the future, only OS I need. Try it for yourself, you'll be happy you did.

I have upgraded to Edgy from Dapper! Because of all the posts I read on the ubuntu forums about upgrade horror stories, I chose to just do a full reinstall. It wasn't so hard but I did run into a few problems that I will document in the next few posts.

One problem has yet to be solved, so if you know my solution, please let me know. My sound doesn't work when i first boot into Edgy, but after a restart it works fine. I will post all the specifics in another entry, but I must say there were a few more problems during the upgrade than I expected. Luckily, Ubuntu has the best support forum I've ever seen.

I am proud to say that VPNC works great. I still have to do a little more configuring to make it so that I no longer have to input all the parameters each time I log in. I am writing from the school library using Ubuntu and VPNC as my connection. For those of you out there who need to use VPN and find Cisco's product troublesome, this is a great solution.

I note that it needs to be run as root to have the proper access. Also you need to know what gateway you are logging on to, the group name and password as well as your own name and password. It does however make those public connections much more secure. I am very happy to use this solution on campus, and no longer rely on windows every time I'm on campus.

I am still trying to find a way to do a good VPN in Ubuntu that works with my schools service. For some reason, I tried to install the Cisco VPN they give us and it didn't work. I had no problems last time so I'm not sure what the difference is this time. I'm trying various open source versions and hopefully will soon be able to confirm the best choice.

Until then have fun in Linux!

I am amazed at the new functionality in automatix. And that they have a new site! I went to the Ubuntu Forums Page and was confused that it didn't have the directions anymore. Well they've made it much easier to install and use and they have their own site now at getautomatix.com.

I was pleasantly suprised this time at the new program choices, as well at the bug fixes. It used to be that I would install and run automatix and then have to go clean up it's work. Like, it would install Mplayer and the firefox plugin, but it wouldn't install any of the needed codecs. So I would have to go to mplayers home page and download them and put them in the right folder myself.

Ok, well I have my new install completed and have decided to put each post here seperately.

First, for those who don't know, the best way to monitor your temp in linux is with this bad boy The Computer Temp Monitor. Now you do have to install the required programs, listed here. You also need to have ACPI or a similarly supported parameter.

I had to use Synaptic to install 'libxml-parser-perl' and I think one of the GTK things. Now this was done after installing automatix and doing several things with it. Regardless, this all works well and I really like the control it gives me. I don't even have this kind of functionality in Windows with the same hardware.

Well, I installed compiz and I had problems with not unmounting the drive in windows before mounting it in linux and all kinds of other stuff, so now I don't even get a menu bar when I log on and Firefox won't save any settings. I think I'm going to have to reinstall Linux and all my goodies, and I think I'll leave off Compiz at least this time around. I'd like to use this laptop for more general purposes and I think I'd like to keep it a little more on the safe side.

I'll post my findings when I learn of the new things I have to do. Until then, if anyone has any ideas on what I can customize, add a comment on here. I am fully open to suggestions.