Martin Notes

I’ve found an article that gives some tips how you can improve the speed of your desktop ubuntu. Usually these tips can break your system, actually some of these tips also can. I’ve applied the following and it works fine. My system feels a bit faster.

1. Prelink

sudo apt-get -y install prelink

Change a line inside the configuration file /etc/default/prelink from

PRELINKING=unknown

to

PRELINKING=yes

We will do our first prelinking by executing following command

sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink

2. Preload

sudo apt-get -y install preload

3. Concurrency

sudo vim /etc/init.d/rc

and find the line CONCURRENCY=none and change it to: CONCURRENCY=shell

Linux, Ubuntu Ubuntu

BlueProximity is really cool. Sadly is couldn’t get it to work with my Treo 650 But imagine the cool if you walk away from your computer and it lock, you return and it unlocks. That would make an impression on your colleagues!

Linux, Ubuntu gadget, review

I’m not up to date with what Adobe wants with it’s Air. But what I’ve seens from the demo’s it’s pretty cool. Whatever it really is, they’ve released it for Linux now:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

I’ve installed it and I’m looking for stuff to play with….

Linux, Web adone air

Ubuntu Tweak used to be a little pathetic tool when I first found it. It gave you a nice entry to the settings in gconf-editor, but that was it. The guys did improve the thing quite a bit now.

It gives you easy installation of several apps like AWN and Cairo, it gives you some metacity settings, power management control. No rocket science, but it’s sweet and very well designed.

I will probably not use it a lot, but it’s a nice tool that gives users access to a lot of interesting tweaking.

Linux, Ubuntu ubuntu tweak

Wow, Sun is on the loose! VirtualBox 2.0 has been released: http://www.virtualbox.org/.

I don’t see the difference with the 1.6.2 that I used to run. I guess a lot was improved, but I have a really simple approach to vitalization: if I notice it then I don’t like it, and I haven’t noticed VirtualBox ever. That means it’s working for me.

So, why did I update? Hey, I’m an IT guy! I need to run the latest version

Linux virtualbox 2

OpenOffice.org has released the first release candidate of their 3.0 version.

They’ve updated the GUI a bit, which is a bit better then the 2.4, but it still doesn’t really compare to MS Office 2007. It reads MS Office 2007 blahx files now, frankly: who cares? Nice is that the notes in Writer are now shown in the margin, instead of a tiny yellow flake in the text.

Overall it’s pretty good, but not the huge improvement I hoped for.

If want to go through the German thoroughness then read the release notes: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.0.0rc1.html

It’s quite easy to install:

1. Download: http://download.openoffice.org/680/
2. Open a terminal
3. “tar xvf OOo_3.0.0rc1_20080904_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz”
4. “cd OOO300_m5_native_packed-3_en-US.9350/DEBS”
5. “sudo dkpg -i *.deb”
6. “cd “desktop-integration”
7. “sudo dkpg -i *.deb”

That’s it. There should be entries in the gnome menu, pretty good install for a release candidate. What they should have mentioned that you should kill the config directories in your home.

1. “cd ~”
2. “rm -fR openoffice.org”
3. “rm -fR openoffice.org2″
4. “rm -fR openoffice.org3″

I tried to start OO3 without that, but then it kept throwing document recovered messages at me.

Linux openoffice 3 RC1

I’ve blogged about this before, but I really like the Elementary Desktop Project. Since they have a real site now. I thought I spend a little attention to them again. It made me change desktop wallpaper.

GUI, Linux, Personal elementary deskop project

Hans Reiser, developer of the ReiserFS, has been found guilty. He has actually pointed the authorities to the grave of his wife. So there is little doubt left that he is quilty.

I’m running his filesystem on my machine, that feels weird.

Linux, Personal murder, paul reiser

I’ve been searching for a new approach to filemanagement for a while now. In my search I ran into Nemo. That’s a pretty interesting idea. It organizes your files grouped by date. I don’t know if that works, you loose the possibility to make your own structure. I like to keep a project oriented structure in my files, I’m not sure the date thing would work.

But at least somebody is thinking of other solutions then the directory thing which sucks for years already. My project directory contains about 8500 files, and that’s the from the last two years only. How am I going to find anything in that? The Google approach is the best so far: just search. Sadly there are very little desktop client that really enable this. Google Desktop is too clumsy and takes too much CPU. Deskbar is rubbish, at least I can never find what I’m looking for. Tracker… Nice try.

Are there any alternatives? Tagging sounds promising. If I can tag my documents, preferably in a visual way (drag some existing tags to it, or something). Then some tag cloud to browse… Maybe it would work.

Then I was playing with Cairo Dock. It took me hours to get it to do what I want. The good thing is: it can do what I want, the bad thing is: it takes a lot of time. The config gui is absolute crap. Anyway, it does work, that’s cool!

GUI, Linux Cairo Dock, Nemo

The new Elementary theme is pretty good. I don’t like the GDM theme and the scroll bars have reversed light and dark, but the overall look is quite good.

Apparently it’s really complicated to create a dark theme that still works. There are a lot of themes available but they all have a weak spot. This one is working so far…

I’m using AWN right now, but I’m switching to Cairo Dock. Man, what a huge amount of configs!

GUI, Linux Elementary, theme