Hear my word down to the very letter,
and you shall know our characters better.
Our first and last are two of one,
Found leading nowhere and leading none.
Also the twins sit together, a pair
following everyone and leading everywhere.
Some more of us stay grouped together as ten,
But going the wrong way,
they end where they begin.
Only one remains, and I stand tall.
Can you give the number of us all?
SSH Login to my Ubuntu 8.04 machine was slow. (It would delay about 5 seconds after I issued the ssh command for the remote machine to request a password.) I believe this is because the remote machine is on my home network, and I have set up it’s hostname using host entries instead of having a true DNS name.
I edited the /etc/init.d/sshd_config file and added the single line:
UseDNS no
which fixed this problem as soon as I restarted the SSH server, with
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
Ubuntu 9.04 comes with some visual effects from Compiz turned on by default. This post contains a list of the key combo’s used to active some of them. Compiz also offers many other “cool” effects. If you install the compizconfig settings manager you can enable/disable all of the neat effects (most of which are eye-candy, and not really useful).
Continue reading
Following the directions on Lars’ blog, I set up an encrypted home directory on Ubuntu 9.04 using LUKS.
The following commands were all executed with root permissions. Add “sudo” to the front of the commands if you are not running with root permissions. Continue reading
The netflix watch on demand video player uses Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight has an “adaptive playback” mode which attempts to choose one of multiple bandwidths for your video (and switch on the fly if your internet connection has more ore less bandwidth over time).
To see what it is currently using, press the Control, Alt, Shift and D keys all at the same time.
CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-D gives diagnostic information on-screen.
If you would like to force netflix to use a specific bandwidth (typical sizes are 500, 1000, and 1500 KBps, or 50, 100, 150 kilo-bytes a second), press the Alt, Control, Shift and S key at the same time.
CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-S allows you to manually force silverlight/netflix player to use a specific bandwidth for playback.
This can be useful if you want the absolute best quality (and are willing to pause the movie every so often to let it buffer), or if you are willing to use a lower quality than your full network connection supports so that some extra bandwidth is available for other users or applications.
NOTE: I was unable to get the key-combos above to work in full-screen mode. I had to have the netflix player in a browser window for them to work. In addition, sometimes I had to click within the siliverlight window (for example, by pressing the play/pause button) before the key combination would work.
I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 over the weekend.
The good:
Faster boot up. (worth the upgrade all by itself)
New notification “bubbles” that appear and then disappear again without any fuss.
OpenOffice 3.0 and other software upgrades.
The Bad:
Required tweaks to my pam_mount.conf.xml file to get my encrypted home directory to work. (Not an issue for most users.)
Bluetooth communication ports (serial over bluetooth) started giving errors because standard users no longer had permissions to use them. Adding the following code to an /etc/udev/rules.d/rfcomm.rules file allowed all users in the “dialout” group to access the /dev/rfcommXXX serial over bluetooth ports. (Ubuntu developers know about this problem and it will be fixed eventually.)
KERNEL=="rfcomm*", GROUP="dialout"
Java support for MIDI music failed until I installed timidity again with the following command:
sudo apt-get install timidity pmidi
The Annoying:
The hardware buttons on my thinkpad (brightness, volume, etc) still work, but no longer have an on screen display. I could fix this by installing the tpb (thinkPadButtons) package, but it takes up extra CPU cycles and power. I found that the packagers are actively discussing this issue and have decided to wait until they fix the issue within the default packages.
When running Pidgin (IM client), an “envelope” icon appears inside a “indicator-applet 0.1” to show that it’s running. Of course, Pidgin itself pops up another icon to show that it’s running on my gnome panel at the same time. I’ve thought about removing the indicator-applet from my panel to remove the duplicate items, but worried about what else I may miss if it’s not there to “hold all of the system indicators”. I eventually decided to go into the Pidgin preferences and select “Show System Tray Icon” only “on unread messages” which mostly fixed this annoyance, although now I need two button clicks to bring the IM window to the top instead of just one.
The ATI M6 graphics processor on my IBM X31 laptop was not automatically configured to use hardware acceleration. To use ppracer and other applications that require hardware acelleration to work well (such as the new version of lyx!) I had to edit my xorg.conf file following directions I found here.
One of the claimed features that made me upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 was the boot-up speed increases. Before the upgrade using Ubuntu 8.10 it took my computer 55 seconds to boot up to the login screen. Including a very fast (2 second) login, it took 1:25 until the desktop was “usable”. Starting Thunderbird and Firefox immediately took until 1:55 to bring up both windows.
After I installed Ubuntu 9.04 I timed the login. I was impressed with the speed increases. It took
35 seconds to get to the login screen. Including a very fast (2 second) login, it took 1:05 until the desktop was “usable”. Starting up both Thunderbird and Firefox were ready to use by one minute and thirty seconds after bootup.
The bootup time of Ubuntu 9.04 is identical to that of Windows Vista (the shutdown time is approximately 5 seconds faster)
I just used the distribution upgrade option to move from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04. My dm-crypt encrypted home directory initially refused to load, and I had to change my volume entry in the /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml to make it work again.
Specifically, a few of the defaults had changed, so now I had to specify the old (8.04) defaults (ripemd160 hash).
< volume user="summetj" fstype="crypt" path="/dev/sda6" mountpoint="/home/summetj" options="cipher=aes,hash=ripemd160,fsk_cipher=aes-256-ecb,fsk_hash=md5" keyfile="/home/summetj.key" / >
Just replaced an HP 74 black ink cartridge and purchased another backup cartridge for $13.11 (well below the standard price). Difference in weight between the full (28g) and empty cartridge (23g) is 5 grams. Assuming ink has the same density as water, that is $9507 a gallon. Assuming the 200 page per cartridge yield from HP is accurate, that’s also 15.26 cents a page.
The Delta Airlines Skymiles American Express card will offer 20 to 25 thousand bonus Skymiles (Frequent Flier Points) when you first sign up. However, once you have signed up for a card, collected the miles, and then canceled the card, they no longer give you bonus miles for signing up again.
However, Northwest (NWA) and Delta are now in the process of merging. If you have a worldperks account, you can transfer it’s miles (points) at a 1 to 1 ratio into your delta account (after linking the two accounts). NWA also offers a WorldPerks Visa that gives you a 20,000 mile bonus for signing up. So, if you apply for the WorldPerks Visa, and purchase something with it, you get 20,000 miles in your NWA account, which you can then transfer into your Delta Skymiles account. (If you decline to give them an email address, you get a flier with a URL in your first bill that offers another 500 bonus miles if you register an email address.)