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• June 25th, 2008

Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 is officially out: a “pre-review”

• April 24th, 2008

There’s a good concise summary of Hardy Heron installation and upgrade options over at Tombuntu.

I’ve been running the beta version via upgrade from Gutsy 7.10, and continually receiving updates, for the last month or so. I guess with this last round of updates I’ll officially be running Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS.

On the surface the changes between Gutsy 7.10 and Hardy 8.04 don’t appear dramatic, which is a good thing since Gutsy really didn’t need dramatic changes in my opinion, just a little spit’n'polish. Since this is an Long Term Support (LTS), Hardy Desktop users can expect security updates for the next 3 years.

Here’s a few things I have noticed as a user, without digging too much “under the hood”.

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Serve files via scp or sftp, without giving full shell access to users

• March 1st, 2008

The scp and sftp commands, as part of the OpenSSH suite, are great secure ways to transfer files around … they generally make a great secure alternative to FTP. However, I’d often wondered if there was a way of allowing file transfer with scp or sftp without giving users a full SSH-accessible shell account on my machine. Who knows what they may run

Ubuntu Geek has the answer, with this quick writeup on how to install and configure scponly.

scponly runs in a chrooted environment (under /home/scponly by default), which in theory should stop users fiddling with your machine via ssh, but will still give them read/write access to the incoming directory within the chrooted directory tree.

I probably wouldn’t trust it for unrestricted public access (since I’m just paranoid about things like this, unless it’s a really well known tool on a properly secured server), but it certainly would be useful for friends, family, colleagues and collaborators.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 on a Dell Vostro 1500 laptop

• November 29th, 2007

What works, executive summary:

3D graphics (Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT) - yes (minor config required)

Sound output (Intel 82801H HDA controller, ICH8 chipset) - yes (more serious config required)

Sound input (mic, line-in) -untested

Wired network -yes

Wireless network -yes

Firewire (IEEE1394) -yes (more serious config required for MiniDV video camera usage)

SD card slot -yes

Integrated webcam (optional) -yes (but seems unsupported by some older software)

Touchpad pointing device -yes

External CRT video port - only in ‘text’ mode yes, enable with ‘nvidia-settings’ command

PCI Express slot -untested

Here’s the output of lspci so everyone can see exactly what hardware I have, since sometimes Dell changes components within models: Dell Vostro 1500 lspci output

What follows is a review of the hardware features of the laptop that worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10, and what I did to fix the few problems that I encountered. Overall, I’m extremely happy with the performance and hardware support of Ubuntu Linux on this notebook, and apart from a fix required for sound support, there were no show-stoppers that would prevent any computer user capable of installing Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX from installing and using Ubuntu happily on this machine.

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Ubuntu install on Asus P5K-E, Core2 Duo E6750

• August 24th, 2007

I recently bought a new PC. Specs are: Intel Core2 Duo E6750, Asus P5K-E Wifi/AP motherboard (using the new Intel P35 chipset), two 320 Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drives. Video is a PCI-E Nvidia 7900GS based card (FORSA), which I bought from a friendly ebayer since the price/performance is better than the 8600 series cards, and I have no need for DirectX 10.

Here are my experiences installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), amd64 Desktop version (yes, amd64 is the 64-bit version also used for Intel Core2 processors. I wish that was advertised more clearly, since it took a bit of hunting to confirm it was the right choice). Read the rest of this entry »

Automatix. Caveat emptor.

• August 6th, 2007

Ever since I made the switch from Mandriva Linux to Ubuntu GNU/Linux as my primary desktop OS a few years back, I’ve used a program called Automatix to install various useful programs that, usually due to licensing incompatibilities, are not included in the official Ubuntu distributions. This includes things like Google Earth, Google Picasa, Skype, various audio and video codecs, as well as bits of ’sexy’ peer-to-peer filesharing and DVD ripping software that all the cool kids have gotta have these days. All these programs don’t require Automatix to install them, but Automatix has always made it simple - a no brainer. Well, turns out despite being simple from a users perspective, Automatix may not be the best thing if you value system stability. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a rabid Ubuntu fanboy … but …

• August 2nd, 2007

I’ve just skimmed through an article entitled “Tech Writers Think Ubuntu Is For Morons”, and while I expect that it is just flamebait, I was compelled to comment (below is basically what I wrote as a comment on the Digg posting).

The author whinges about how tech writers describe “how-tos” for simple, mundane tasks in Ubuntu, and because of the “Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs” tone often used, Ubuntu is getting a stigma that it is for morons.

I don’t see what the problem is. Read the rest of this entry »