Getting Ubuntu on a HP mini 100 is well documented and well supported, to make wireless and ethernet work see here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks#Karmic

Thing is, the driver packges needed by the Broadcom Wireless card are on the Install Media, they are just not included in the default install set. So a couple of commands during the install process and you can have wireless working on first boot.

Install Ubuntu. After install, before you hit restart press: ctrl+alt+F1

At the terminal prompt:

$ sudo su -
# chroot /target
# aptitude install bcmwl-kernel-sources

Now press ctrl+alt+F7 and click Reboot. You should now have wireless on first boot.

I have been frustrated with the Exchange server here at work, and found that Evolution MAPI support simply crashes everytime I try it. It is in the ubuntu bug list if you want to go hunting. And I really don’t like Evolution anyway.

But I just found DavMail, and it appears to work great. It is basically a java program that connects to an Outlook OWA (up tp 2007) and presents the information through standard services IMAP/SMTP/CalDAV. So I can now use Sunbird as my Calendar client, pointing it to a CalDAV server running on localhost,  and it seems to work a treat. Installation is straightforward on most platforms and after a bit of fidlling with the settings it is up and running.

You know the font situation on debian and gnome isn’t terrible in lenny. Actually it looks fairly decent. Until you load icedove (thunderbird).

The fonts are teeny, pixelated and hard to read. Luckily it is a very easy fix.

Open icedove, go to “Edit -> Preference -> Advanced -> Config Editor”

Change the value for “layout.css.dpi” from “-1″ to “0″

Restart icedove

My move to rackspace is complete, dreamhost is only providing my DNS now. Being able to control my own apache configs is brilliant. And the site seems fast enough, perhaps even a little faster.

There are other giudes to do this, but none seemed complete, I had to get the iptables rules from the debug document on poptop.org. I guess they are not always needed.
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I tried the blackra1n jailbreak a couple of weeks ago. Wow amazingly easy and quick. I have since restored my phone to a pre-jailbroken state. To be perfectly honest I have not found a compelling reason to run jailbroken since 3.0. But I like to see whats happening on that front every once in a while.

I am thinking of moving host again. I have no issues with dreamhost, but I have been playing with the rackspace cloud, and I like it.

I can have my own virtual machine, lowest specs, for abut the same price as dreamhost each month. And since it is my own box I can do whatever I like with it.

If this site got more hits, and I had to increase the specs, dreamhost would be cheaper, but no one comes here so rackspace will work super.

More importantly this lets me setup a vpn server outside of Australia. While I find it very unlikely that I will ever go to a site banned by the government’s filtering scheme, my protest is to simply bypass it.

http://nocleanfeed.com/

The move will happen over the next few weeks as I find time to install wordpress on debian and get it configured and hardened. The DNS will be staying on dreamhost, so I doubt any changes will be noticed.

I have been using chromium as my primary browser. Unfortunately I have been using some adobe air twitter clients, and they ignore my preferred browser setting.

I found this page: http://blog.andreaolivato.net/open-source/change-adobe-air-apps-default-browser.html.

I followed this except my link pointed to chromium-browser, and the file was simply “/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so”.

The tsclient included with Karmic has a broken tsclient applet. It is a known bug, as simple as a typo. It was discovered over 4 months ago, and a fix has been made upstream.

For whatever reason, nothing has been done other than having the big confirmed.

If you depend on the tsclient applet, as I do, grab the package from debian and install it.

Grab the package for you architecture from here.

And simply install it with dpkg:

$ sudo dpkg -i tsclient_0.150-3_i386.deb

The only difference between this release and the one previous is the removal of this bug, which is a fairly serious bug. Including this in the karmic repo would be trivial, and it should have been done before the 9.10 went final.

I have been attmepting to tether my iPhone to my computer using bluetooth in Karmic.

Supposedy blueman can do this very easily (www.blueman-project.org). To install blueman just run:
$ sudo aptitude install blueman.

My experience with blueman has been very hit and miss however, the connection appears to be made via bluetooth but I can rarely seem to get NetworkManager to make a network connection. Sometimes I have success pairing the devices again.

Using the older pand binary I have had a lot more success. If you are not scared of the terminal, it isn’t difficult and appears far more reliable Read the rest of this entry »