Posted on 16 October, 2010 by maximinus in Ubuntu, Linux
After several iterations of not getting around to upgrading Ubuntu, and subsequently deciding that I may as well wait for the next version as it's nearly here now, I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 this week.
All was going well, until I tried to play Minecraft. I couldn't be bothered finding a mouse, so I was going to play using my laptop's touchpad. At first, it seemed to be working fine - but then everything was very jumpy, with my touchpad input seemingly freezing up and then jumping around. I figured it must be either lag or something wrong with the version of Java I was using, but then, on a whim, plugged a mouse in. The mouse worked fine.
I didn't think much of it at first, thinking that it's not a huge deal if it's just Minecraft - I can use a mouse for that. Then I noticed that it was happening everywhere - even on the desktop. I wondered if there was something wrong with the touchpad driver, causing it to lock up whenever there was keyboard input, but soon discovered the real culprit - a new setting, and its default value.
To fix the issue, all you need to do is untick the "Disable touchpad while typing" checkbox on the "Touchpad" tab of System -> Preferences -> Mouse.
Posted on 18 October, 2006 by maximinus in Ubuntu, Linux
Ubuntu's networking system has something which Windows XP lacks - locations. These allow you to toggle between multiple configurations - for example, "Work" and "Home" - so that you don't have to manually change all of your settings when you change networks. This is very useful for laptops and other portable computers.
However, it has one very major oversight - once you've saved a configuration, that's it. You can't rename it or edit it - only delete it and create another. Neither can you reorder the locations within the dropdown list - they're just in order of first-last created. Also, you can't delete a location (or view it in order to derive a new one from it) without first activating it - a task which can take a considerable amount of time to happen, if the default gateway or DNS server (I'm not sure which; maybe either) is not reachable - i.e. you are not at that location, or one of these has changed and you need to update it.
Just how much effort would it take to actually make it possible to do these simple things? The settings must be stored somewhere - so why can't there be a simple interface for reordering, viewing, editing, renaming, deleting and creating locations without activating them?
To be honest, I haven't searched around to see if there are any applications out there which would do this nicely - I don't really care if there are. Now that I've got everything set up how I need it at the moment, it should be fine (for the time being) - so I don't need to reconfigure my locations any time soon. Consider this to be both a retrospective rant and a suggestion for an improvement which could be made to Ubuntu's network manager.
Update:
Since this post was originally written, the network manager in Ubuntu has been upgraded and most, if not all, of the improvements mentioned above have been implemented. Now all that's needed is a quicker way to swap locations - preferably without having to authenticate using gksu, as I don't see why I should have to type a password just to change network location... automatic switching based on available wireless networks (switch to whichever location has the currently connected wireless network specified, upon connection to a wireless network) would be great too, but should probably be a togglable option (perhaps on a per-location basis, i.e. "Auto-select this location when connecting to this wireless network").
Posted on 13 August, 2006 by maximinus in Ubuntu, Linux
When my laptop hard drive died (from overheating - again) I tried everything I could think of to get the data off it. I froze it, hit it, banged it on the desk, turned it upside down - all the usual tricks. Nothing worked at all. Whether I put it in the laptop or used a USB enclosure, I just couldn't get to the drive.
I decided that since I was going to have to reinstall everything from scratch anyway, I may as well try Ubuntu - Ryan had been hounding me to install it for a while. It was a breeze to install, and I could even sit there playing games while it installed - beat that, Microsoft!
Anyway, after a minor niggle with the wlan not supporting WPA-PSK (which is resolved), everything seems to be working fine - Compiz gives me graphical effects which Windows wouldn't be able to perform nearly as well on the processor (Compiz even did it fine when the CPU was locked at 600MHz). There is only one exception - the built-in (well, more like butchered-up PCMCIA) SD/MMC/MS reader doesn't work.
Anyway, back to the "dead" hard drive. I decided to have another crack at it today. I tried putting it back in the laptop and manually setting the drive parameters in the BIOS, since it detected it, but as a 0MB drive. One problem - the BIOS on this machine doesn't allow manual parameter input - it's auto-only. So, on a whim, I slapped it back in the USB enclosure - and plugged it into the laptop with Ubuntu running. Ubuntu picked up the drive and automounted it - and I immediately had full access to both partitions on the drive. I have now copied off everything I think I might want/need from it that I don't have elsewhere - it was running for upwards of half an hour with no problems. I could probably just keep running it as a USB HDD under Ubuntu with no problems - but I'd rather not risk it, so it's just going to sit around in case I find the need for something else off it.
Overall summary: Ubuntu beats Windows hands-down (after a bit of setup, but hey - Windows takes longer to install and also requires tweaking to get decent performance).