Tag Archives: ubuntu

Tab Sweep

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I’ve always found CSS all but impossible to debug, so I use as little of it as possible. Here’s a tool that can help: csscss.

I’m so out of touch with media formats, I was still using ffmpeg instead of avconv. If you’re a clueless n00b like me, there are tools that just do it for you. One of them is FF Multi Converter.

This is just insanely cool. Watch the video and make a HyperLapse.

For the past several years, I’ve been developing and using (and developing some more) my own digital photography workflow and it kind of stinks. I’m intrigued by the idea of replacing it with something like Darktable. (Kudus: iLoveUbuntu.)

Years ago, I wrote part of what became Smaart. The part I liked best was the audio spectrogram feature. Today, I see there’s Spek, but it appears not to have the feature I was so pleased with myself for putting in Smaart. It makes me wonder if I could actually, for the first time in 2 decades, make a useful contribution to an FOSS project.

And finally, as a treat, watch this interview with Margaret Thatcher that Ann Althouse posted:

XFCE

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I quit using Linux (except as a file server) almost 10 years ago, so I completely missed the Desktop wars. Apparently KDE and Gnome won, with Gnome winning the part of the Linuxphere known as Ubuntu. Which leads to all kinds of out of date help pages telling you how you used to administer a Ubuntu system (“From System Administration choose Disk Utilities”). Along with a fair few pages complaining how Gnome 2 was better, or Gnome 3 was bad but 3.6 fixed most of the problems, or whatever.

As may be. I’m a crusty old bearded Unix user, from the era of Window Managers rather than Desktop Environments. (Well, CDE begat KDE, so I guess there were Desktop Environments even back in those days, but I never worried about them.) For me, it was a big deal (with no small amount of editing config files) to move from FVWM to WindowMaker.

So what do I do? I don’t know. But I’m thinking about Xubuntu and XFCE. How’s that for rebellion? You say you want a revolution!

Ubuntu Linux on an HP RP5700

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I recently had the opportunity to purchase four (4) HP RP5700 systems at $20 each. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with the others, but I’m installing Ubuntu Linux on one of them. Here are some notes along the way.

It’s odd how difficult Ubuntu makes it to find the checksums (MD5 hashes) for the ISOs you download. Forget security, how do you know it downloaded properly? It turns out there’s a whole separate page telling you what the checksums are.

Burning CDs is hopeless. Optical discs are such an amazingly useless medium. About one in four works at all, and those suffer from bit rot even quicker than floppy disks used to. The instructions for making a CD are fine, but the Burning ISOs HOWTO is available if you have problems.

I’m so glad we have USB sticks now. The instructions for making a bootable USB stick are somewhat arcane, but I have the computer science background that makes it look easy.

I had problems installing the bootloader. That’s a fatal error, I understand, from an otherwise unhelpful dialog box. A whole bunch of searching around brought this page to my attention, which explains what to do about certain kinds of grub installation failures.