I received a comment from John asking about using a mic with Ubuntu on a Dell Studio. I hadn’t tried to use my mic before, so I thought that it was time to try it out. After playing around a bit, I figured it out.
I received a comment from John asking about using a mic with Ubuntu on a Dell Studio. I hadn’t tried to use my mic before, so I thought that it was time to try it out. After playing around a bit, I figured it out.
Don’t you hate when you need to know and exact model of a specific hardware component but don’t want to open up the machine or find the original documentation on it? Never fear, Linux has you covered.
There are a variety of ways to find out what kind of hardware you’re running, but one of the easiest ways that gives you large amounts of valuable data is to use lshw (Hardware Lister). I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), and lshw is installed by default. You can test if you have lshw installed on you system by running the following command:
[chris@home ~]$ sudo lshw
If you get a large listing spewed out on your terminal, you’re good to go. Skip down to the Using lshw section. If you run the lshw command and get a “bash: lshw: command not found” error, you should be able to install lshw using your system’s package manager easily.
I wanted to be able to access my home network from outside the home. My internet connection has a dynamic IP. This means that my home’s IP address on the web can change at any time. So the question is how do you connect to something that is constantly changing location?
The answer is easy, use a Dynamic DNS service. There are a variety of these services: No-IP, DynDNS, zoneedit, FreeDNS, etc. Each of these sites that I’ve listed offers free Dynamic DNS service.
So what is Dynamic DNS? It would probably be best to first define what DNS is and then what makes Dynamic DNS different.
I’m very new to running Linux as a desktop OS, but I am by no means new to running Linux itself. I’ve managed Linux servers in a professional capacity for more than five years, so I have a healthy foundation on how to work with it, but I don’t know how to use it day in and day out as my entire computing experience. That being the case, I started to look for books that would help me out.
I primarily limited my search to Ubuntu books (in hindsight, maybe that was my issue). Off to Barnes & Noble I went in search of a great book to bring me deeper into Ubuntu.
As a web developer, I’m always having to work with DNS. Anyone who has dealt with DNS will tell you that caching is simultaneously a great thing and a horrible thing.
Today, I made a mistake with the IP address of a new host, and I needed to flush my DNS cache so that my machine would go and grab the new IP address. I hadn’t done this in Ubuntu before, so I had to figure it out. Fortunately, it’s really easy.
sudo service networking restartDone. Enjoy your newly flushed DNS cache.
As of today, it has been exactly two weeks since I started using Ubuntu as my OS at the office. Not only that, it’s been two weeks since my office computer (Dell Studio 17) has booted into Windows.
I left Windows on the system “just in case,” but much to my surprise, I haven’t needed it once. Running Ubuntu is different than running Windows, but it’s not any more difficult. In fact, Ubuntu is much more powerful and forgiving than Windows has been. I can work so much faster now that I’m running Ubuntu than I ever have been able to with Windows, and that’s without being able to use my favorite editor, Crimson Editor.
I just experienced a very odd behavior with Firefox on my system. Somehow, my titlebar had disappeared. I chose to ignore this as an odd glitch, figured it would go away when Firefox was restarted, and went about my work.
Eventually, it started to drive me nuts. Not only was the titlebar missing, but I could not resize Firefox, could not move Firefox, and it kept stealing focus from other applications and obscuring new windows.
Even at this point, I did not want to restart Firefox yet, so I kept just ignoring it. Then, Firefox froze entirely. It seems like I could still interact with Firefox via the keyboard (since the titles in the Window List panel kept changing), but the rendered image of Firefox never changed.
Restarting Firefox didn’t work. Restarting the system didn’t work. Changing from Emerald to Metacity (run “metacity –replace”) didn’t work. Uninstalling some new packages didn’t work. I was at a loss.
I settled back into just dealing with the problem, when I happened to accidentally switch Firefox to fullscreen (F11). Amazingly, when I switched back to normal, the problem went away.
So, the quick way to fix the problem of a missing titlebar in Firefox with Ubuntu (this problem may be present in other distros as well) is to switch to fullscreen and then back. Basically, you can press F11 twice to fix it.
image from New Life Service Co.
I got an emergency call from a friend yesterday. His computer was totally eaten up by viruses and couldn’t function anymore. He’s a writer and doesn’t do backups, so he was naturally very afraid that he would lose the book drafts that he’s been working on.
I brought him and his ailing computer over to my place to give it some TLC and get it back in fighting condition. This system, Raine, is special to me as it was the second computer I built. That was way back in 2002, and when I cracked the case, horror itself greeted me. I could see that I had a long night ahead of me.
Lumière is a system I built a couple of months ago to be a pure Linux-only machine. I haven’t done much with her, but it’s time to change that. As I’ve posted before, I really wanted to run different distros through their paces in order to weigh their pros and cons. However, I also wanted to have a system that I could actually use, so I decided to do a multiboot system with shared /home partitions.
Last night, I decided to start off easy and add Linux Mint (Felicia) on top of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). Now I say that this is easy since Linux Mint is actually a modified version of Ubuntu (which also happens to be a modified version of Debian). Since Linux Mint and Ubuntu share a similar structure, all the user and group IDs would be the same. This means that setting up a shared /home partition would be much simpler.
I also wanted to use Linux Mint since it has been highly recommended to me many times.
My quest for the perfect Ubuntu desktop continues.
Today, I really wanted to remove all of my desktop icons since I like using that area for storage, but I don’t like having all that stuff strewn across each of my workspaces since I never actually use the desktop itself. I searched around and found some helpful information, but it really didn’t do what I wanted. I’ll provide that information in case it does what you want.
The Configuration Editor is Ubuntu’s (more acurately, Gnome’s) application that lets you control a massive number of options that all work together to present your desktop, file browser, windowing system, etc. You can add and remove system generated icons from the desktop by using the Configuration Editor (from now on referred to as Gconf. To load Gconf press “Alt+F2” to bring up the Run Application dialog, type in gconf-editor, and click Run.
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