Linux

This came to my attention and I had to share it:

Ubuntu 10.04

Another six months, another version of Ubuntu. As always, there are some improvements, as always I hoped to see more. The first thing to grab your attention is the new theme. I am not impressed. To tell you the truth, I liked the old 9.10 theme and wallpapers. Quite incredibly the old theme is no longer available in 10.04, wtf? On the positive side this is the first useful dark theme. It still needs a lot of polish though.

Supposedly, Lynx is much faster, but I didn't notice a considerably shorter boot time. Thankfully, the problems with my PC's WiFi chipset seem to be fixed. The two column view in Nautilus is useful, Gnome journal is interesting and I found an effective auto-completion plugin in GEdit (at last). Moreover, Flash 10.1, as integrated in the latest version of Chrome, works flawlessly.

All in all, there is definite progress, but I am afraid Ubuntu will share the fate of OpenOffice: to be rendered irrelevant by the Web.

When marketing people drive company acquisitions you can expect peculiar results.

Consider Nokia. They bought Trolltech, yet they used GTK over Qt in Maemo5 (though I am hearing they 'll switch to Qt in the next version). What about Novel? The acquired Ximian (founded by Gnome hackers), yet they offer KDE as the default SuSE Linux desktop (true, they where probably more interested in Mono).

Go figure...

Just... WOW!

There are many reasons to disable ipv6 on Ubuntu (If you don't really need it). Among others:

Some users report a noticeable improvement in network performance.
It's a workaround for a serious Tomcat6 bug

After a short Google session I found many (slightly different) 'solutions'. Nothing worked though. Eventually, I came across a solution that did the trick:

$ vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

append the following line:

blacklist ipv6

save the file and restart your machine! You can verify that ipv6 is actually disabled using the following command:

$ ip a | grep inet6

If you see not output this little exercise was successful. Go make yourself a cup of coffee!

BTW, I tried this on Ubuntu 8.10

For the last 4 years I am using Ubuntu as the main Operating System on all my laptops and desktop computers. It 's true that I faced my share of problems and annoyances, but generally I am happy with the evolution of this fine Linux distribution (and I dig the free CD's ;-))

Following a long standing ritual, some days ago, I backed up my home directory and installed a fresh copy of the new version, Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex. After a quick customization session, here I am, up and running:

My impressions... more

Ultra geeky holiday e-Card

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

Marketing acquisitions?

Nokia N900

How to disable ipv6 on Ubuntu

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)