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Living on the edge with Ubuntu
As I said earlier, I’m not very impressed with Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy), but I’ll give it an other chance. There are some rumors floating around that July 10 there will be some major updates and the steady stream of updates seem to fix a few issues as well. Warning! Don’t do this if you can’t…
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Small Qemu tips
It’s official: Ubuntu has the best documentation out there. There is almost no problem for it you can’t fix by typing "Ubuntu [description of the problem]" or "Ubuntu [error message]" in your favorite search engine. For example, here you can find a very exhaustive documentation on installing Qemu and Kqemu (the Kqemu part is the…
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Power management for Ubuntu
I was praising Ubuntu earlier for its great hardware support. One thing it didn’t have out of the box however (which is a very nice feature of modern hardware) was dynamic frequency scaling. There is a detailed description over at the Ubuntu Guide wiki which worked nicely (yes, you actually need to remove packages –…
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Setting up Xming or RDP equivalent for Linux
To give a little background: the GUI under Linux (and Unix) is usually distributed the following way: X (the short term commonly used for X Windows System or X11) – this knowns how to draw some primitive elements (like boxes, text, etc) and to get input (from keyboard, mouse, etc) and also has the primitive…
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Which password?
A little note about mounting Truecrypt volumes: When you issue a command like this: sudo truecrypt [truecrypt volume] [where to mount it] You will be greated with the following prompts: Password: [your password to elevate privileges] Enter password for ‘[truecrypt-volume]’: [the password to the truecrypt volume] Now in hindsight it’s clear which password goes where,…
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Setting up a PPTP VPN (client) with Ubuntu
This applies to the latest release (7.04), because from what I understand older versions had more (complicated) steps to follow. My solution is based on this blog posting combined with some advice from here. The steps are: Install the network-manager-pptp package (either by doing sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp, by using Synaptic or any other way…
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Finding a Windows computer based on its NetBios name
A short tip: when working in hybrid environments (that is where both Windows and Linux machines are present), it is useful to be able to lookup a machine IP based on its NetBios name. You can do this by writing nmblookup [the name of the computer]. This will do a broadcast on all the interfaces…
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Offline updating of Debian systems
It has been my experience that a Linux system is much more usable if it’s connected to the Internet, because then the package management system can be used to resolve the dependencies of the programs. From what I’ve seen (and please bear in mind that I’m fairly new to it), in Linux it is much…
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Installing and using Truecrypt on Ubuntu
Update: while truecrypt still doesn’t offer native packages (ie. .deb / .rpm) for Linux distributions, their shellscript installer works just fine. So the simplified version of the installation procedure is: Download the correct package from Truecrypt (either 32 or 64 bit – you can find out which you need by typing uname -a – if…
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Linux tips
Via the All About Linux blog: bash completion – if you type ls — in your terminal and you tap the tab key twice, it will list all the available options. This works only of the most important commands (like ls, rm, …) but it’s still a nice add-on. And best of all – it…