Alternative wireframes for Ubuntu windicators

Here is Mark Shuttleworth’s original wireframes for Ubuntu windicators. It is an interesting concept – now you can see why the window controls had to be moved to the left. However, there are some things you need to take note of: Will this mean that themes which have right side window controls are incompatible or [...]

hey nVidia – get a handle on Lucid Lynx’s problems

Just take a look at the problems reported on the forums (and these mailing lists). Take a look at the bugs – here, here and here… oh and this is my bug, affecting nearly every machine in my office – which (unsurprisingly), I base on nVidia + AMD. nVidia has been our choice for a long [...]

Unslowable Linux

For the past week, I have tuned my linux installation to be unslowable – it honors my available RAM and swap and if memory goes low, any new processes terminate rather than thrash (inherently slowing down my system) There is a bit of tuning involved in this: the key parameters involved are  (in /etc/sysctl.conf ) [...]

Cheap webcam in Linux (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10) with Skype

I think I found a 5$ webcam which can be used with Skype in Linux. I used Skype 2.1 with Ubuntu Karmic 64-bit. The said webcam is this : http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.13 . I am not 100% sure, since I bought a variant of it in India, but as long as the lsusb output shows Bus 002 [...]

ATI IXP AD1981B (Thinkpad R51e) sound on Jaunty

This was tough.. so here’s a quick list: Your sound preferences should look like this: Your alsamixer should look like this Install the following sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk gstreamer0.10-alsa libasound2-plugins libesd-alsa0 sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer sudo apt-get install bum Your boot-up-manager should look like this (notice the unchecked PulseAudio) die.. pulse.. die!! Reboot and enjoy

A clean install of Ruby 1.9.1 + Ruby-on-Rails 2.3.2 on Ubuntu 9.04

I think the best way to go about this is to build everything from source. There are a few caveats of course, but I hope to clear them up. Prerequisites: sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev mysql-client libssl-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev Download the sources for ruby, rubygems, mysql-ruby OPTIONAL: Add this patch to ruby for [...]

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and Sansa players – howto get them working together

It seems Jaunty has a bug working with Sansa players – the Fuze, the E-series etc. It works intermittently in RhythmBox with MTP mode and doesnt work at all in the (more compatible) MSC mode. The problem is with some of the other probes that are conflicting with this device – I think Ubuntu thinks [...]