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• Unofficial Ubuntu Wallpaper Archive

With each successive release the Ubuntu server VMWare image I run when I'm in XP gets more and more bloated.

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Getting rid of all the login startup gumpf in recent versions of Ubuntu server: (see eg. Ubuntu forums Server 10.04: How to Eradicate the MOTD System?)

sudo apt-get purge landscape-common landscape-client
sudo chmod -x /etc/update-motd.d/*

You can probably delete 'em just as easily. Put something friendly in /etc/motd to compensate.

(As a reminder, the other slow login culprit can often be if the server can't resolve the client's hostname, usually fixed on local machines or VMs by adding an entry to /etc/hosts.)

I don't know how I stumbled across it but I read a post on Mark Shuttleworth's blog about tooltips on the panel being removed in the next version of Ubuntu. There's been a bit of an outcry on a related bug and elsewhere.

Like many users I use the tooltips all the time - hover over the system monitor, hover over the time to check the date, etc etc. It's a bit tenuous saying 'less is more' when it means that something that was afforded by a simple hover now requires multiple clicks (especially on something as sluggish as Gnome, but that's another story...) Less has now become more (effort).

It's just annoying, and it happens often with free software (and for all I know, proprietary software) where someone makes a decision where removing a useful feature is done in a way that seems arbitrary or ill-considered. There was once a feature in Eclipse which allowed you to disable the 'Insert' key so that you didn't accidentally go into overwrite mode, a mode used (I suspect) by about 3 human beings on the planet and is nothing but a headache for every other developer out there. It was removed a few versions ago and when someone opened a bug to say 'hey, what's happened to this feature?' a developer replied saying, in effect, 'I asked around my colleagues and nobody used it, so we took it out, now run along'. I remember it well because it was one in a line of 'changes' that left me generally thinking that Eclipse sucks, no matter how many other cool features it's added since.

Missing tooltips and disabled insert keys aren't the kind of thing you're going to switch distributions or operating systems or IDEs over, but it leaves you feeling done in, and when enough frustrations add up, you do switch. Switching software isn't always a rational, coldly-considered decision, it's often just someone saying 'Sod this, I've had enough', when they'll barely remember all of the things that've gotten them so annoyed in the first place.

The moral of the story, really, and it applies everywhere, is that people are a lot unhappier when you take something away from them than if you'd never given it to them in the first place.

Upgrading to Karmic Koala has been a pain. The version of GTK+ used by Koala has exposed a bug in how SWT uses GTK+, apparently. It manifests in dialog buttons sometimes not working - you hover the mouse over a button but clicking doesn't work.

Anyhoo, to fix, you can export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 (in a startup script, say), to get the proper behaviour back. Apparently to be fixed in 3.5.2, no idea when that's due.

(via)

Firefox 3.5 has blurry fonts for me, apparently it doesn't obey Gnome font settings. From Fix Firefox fonts in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic:

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

An interesting take by Jeremey Allison on Mono. There is still uncertainty about Microsoft's patents covering .Net, and they could be a problem for Mono.

A new Ubuntu distro based on the LXDE desktop environment. This article shows that not only does Lubuntu use a fraction of what Ubuntu uses, but it looks like Xubuntu, based on Xfce, is more of a memory hog than Ubuntu.

cpulimit (via) allows you to throttle specific processes and applications. Just the thing for my stupid-ass laptop which is overheating, partly because the fan needs cleaning but mainly because (as I've come to conclude), Acer laptops are crap.

Linux Journal: Creating a Bash Spinner