Posts tagged Ubuntu

Dear lazyweb, Where's the GNOME applet that can show me my laptop's power usage in Watt? I cannot believe that nobody has written one yet.

Andrew Dalke writes about his painful attempts to install Ubuntu Feisty on a Thinkpad T23. I've had a T23 and ran various versions of Ubuntu on it happily. When it works, Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is great; when it doesn't work, it is painful (but at least I can fix it, unlike, say, Windows). One thing, though: the T23 doesn't support USB2. Using an external hard disk over USB1 is very slow and uncomfortable.

I want to be able to install small and simple Python packages from Cheeseshop by typing 'easy_install packagename'. This does not work out of the box on Ubuntu Gutsy (even after installing python-setuptools): easy_install tries to install stuff into /usr, which (a) requires root permissions and (b) is just Not Done on Linux, where /usr belongs to the distribution's package manager1. 1 /usr/local is for extra stuff. I consider it a bug in setuptools that it prefers /usr over /usr/local.

A week and a half ago I bought a new laptop: a Lenovo T61 (the 15" widescreen version). It's big and not very pretty (but the large screen is very nice), and was a big pain to install. After several days of fiddling I've got Ubuntu Gutsy running on it quite well, with nearly all hardware working. Installation: I used Gutsy Tribe 3 Alternate CD (because the desktop CD either wouldn't boot, or would give me a blank screen).

Last Saturday I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) to Feisty (7.04). The upgrade broke down a bit (like every other Ubuntu upgrade before it, but in a different way): I left the update manager running, and when I came back several hours later, it was gone. Apt in a terminal complained about the upgrade being interrupted and prompted me to run dpkg --configure -a. I did that, answered a bunch of questions about which config files I wanted to override, rebooted, and that was it.