Ubuntu

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.

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 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.