Posts tagged Ubuntu

On my laptop (Pentium M, 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM) it takes exactly 68 seconds from the time I press Enter in the GDM login screen, until the GNOME desktop is completely loaded (the last applets appear and the disk activity stops). This is GNOME 2.16.1 from Ubuntu Edgy. This is after a fresh reboot (so, nothing in disk cache, except for what Ubuntu's readahead loads). The startup process is not interfering (I waited until the disk activity stopped before I logged in).

After I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy), I went looking for eye candy again. My Thinkpad's lowly Radeon Mobility M6 is capable enough (with the open-source 'radeon' driver) to give me Compiz with its rotating cubes and wobbly windows, but only if I disable the blur plugin and give up dual-head support. I suppose 32 megs of video memory is not enough for Compiz on a 2304x1024 desktop. I found xcompmgr instead.

I've been using Linux for almost 10 years now, so I'm used to the command line. Most of the windows in my GNOME desktop are GNOME Terminals. And when you have many of them, you'd like to distinguish them somehow in the window list or window selector applets. My .bashrc specifies a $PROMPT_COMMAND that sets the username, hostname and the current working directory in the title bar. I can therefore distinguish root terminals and remote terminals (ssh rules), and terminals where I work on different projects in different directories.

Many texts on Linux/Unix system administration advise you to have a diary and write down everything you do. I have finally realized the wisdom of this advice. I use a simple shell script /usr/local/sbin/new-changelog-entry. This script adds the current date and time to a file /root/Changelog and opens it in a text editor. I usually have two terminals (or two tabs in GNOME Terminal): one has a root shell where I do things, the other has vi with /root/Changelog.

I've always been annoyed that Firefox deletes the whole URL if you hit Ctrl+Backspace in the location bar. I'd like it to delete the last URL segment. It turns out that I can get this, if I go to about:config and set layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation to true. Yay! Sources: Bug 232321 - Control-backspace doesn't delete words in URL bar Bug 190615 - make stop_at_punctuation=true the default on unix (double-clicking shouldn't select punctuation)