Random notes from mg

a blog by Marius Gedminas

Posts tagged Ubuntu

Mon, Nov 10, 2008

Volume control keys on Ubuntu

Does anybody else think it's retarded that volume control keys do not work if you have a menu open in Ubuntu? I'm sure people can claim there are good technical reasons for that (the toolkit has to grab the X server to implement popup menus, and then gnome-settings-daemon doesn't see the XF86VolumeUp/Down key events or whatever), but if you take a step back and look at this from the user's perspective, it makes no sense.

Sun, Aug 24, 2008

Fixing the netspeed applet

Netspeed is a GNOME panel applet that shows your current upload/download speed in bytes (or bits) per second. I love it. Except... you have to manually say which network device to monitor. If you're switching between wireless and wired, this gets old really quickly. There's an option, Always monitor a connected device, but it is buggy and usually gets stuck monitoring some stupid network interface like wmaster0 or vmnet8.

Fri, Jul 25, 2008

D-bus frustration

So, you hear that your media player supports remote control over D-Bus. That's great, isn't it? So, you're lying on a couch, listening to music and reading a book on your N810. Suddenly a song you don't like starts playing. Do you A. Stand up, walk to the PC, click the "Next song" button with your mouse, or B. Open Terminal on your N810, ssh into your desktop and run banshee-1 --next?

Thu, Jun 26, 2008

Testing Mango Lassi on Hardy

Mango Lassi is a GNOME program that lets you painlessly share keyboard & mouse (& clipboard too!) between computers. It's not packaged for Ubuntu yet so you have to build it from sources. Big fat warning: Mango Lassi has no authentication and does no encryption, so use it with extreme care. Don't type any passwords over your unsecured WiFi network! Here's how to get it working on Ubuntu Hardy:

Sat, Jun 21, 2008

Asus EeePC 900

I unexpectedly acquired an Asus EeePC 900 last weekend. Lovely piece of hardware. The Xandros distro was okay at first (IceWM brought me fond memories of the year 2000, when I used it). Then I started longing for Firefox 3 and the aesthetics of GNOME applications. Finally, when apt-cache search told me there was no SSH server package available, I gave up and installed Ubuntu Eee from a SD card.