Monthly Archives: April 2007

Official Ubuntu Feisty Free CDs arrived just 10 days after release

By | Published: April 30, 2007
I got in from work to find this pack of Ubuntu Feisty CDs waiting for me.
With my basic maths qualification I make that about 10 days from the release (19th April) to it being posted (some time before 30th April [today]). I got a bunch of copies for x86 architecture and a couple of 64-bit machines. They now sport a natty little "Pass It On" logo which looks cunningly like a recycle logo :). Nice touch. I have long since given away all my (hundreds of) acquired Dapper CDs, so will do the same with these. Interestingly my Father-in-law recently bought a laptop which came with a "free" upgrade token thing to Windows Vista. He had to pay postage (hah!) and received it nearly a month later (double hah!). Perversely he only got one copy for one architecture, no additional software (other than trial versions of some very expensive products), isn't allowed to copy the CD and give it to friends, and isn't allowed to install on multiple machines. How do these people cope!? * Ok, so it arrived eleven days after release, so sue me
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Dell XPS Vanity Lights

By | Published: April 20, 2007
Dell XPS Vanity Lights I have a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. Long name for a big laptop.
It has some "vanity lights" on the lid, in the vents and speaker grilles. They are controllable via options in the BIOS and with a Windows based application. When I bought it the first thing I did was install Linux so I have never had the chance to play with controlling the lights from within the OS, only at boot-time from the BIOS. Until now!
Posted in Advocacy, Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 9 Comments

Playing with Babeldisc

By | Published: April 18, 2007
After reading about babeldisk the "safe" Linux distro, I thought I would have a play. Being a tightwad and happy with Ubuntu I decided not to sign up and buy a copy, but download the ISO image and have a look and see what it had on it. I booted up the ISO using the magic that is qemu and kqemu (kernel accelerator). 
$ qemu -cdrom Desktop/babeldisc_20070410.iso -m 512 -net nic -net user -boot d
The initial boot menu has an option for the "babel booster" which is a device you can buy from them which looks like it caches your data locally. I don't have one so I booted using the second option - without the babel booster.
Initial boot menu
Posted in Advocacy, Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 3 Comments

Am I Hot Or Not

By | Published: April 16, 2007
We have just had quite a warm weekend here in the UK. As temperatures rise, often so does the likelyhood of computer failure. In my experience this happens more in the home or small office where air conditioning isn't quite so prevalent (in the UK). One component that doesn't like high tempreatures is the hard disk. Enter hddtemp, a great little package to tell you how hot your disks are. It's been around a while, but many people don't know about it. I found myself installing it on everything and pasting in IRC, then a few others starting doing the same. It can be run on the command line to get the current temperature, or can be used as a daemon which can provide information to other clients such as gkrellm.
It works well, giving reasonable values. My desktop:- 
alan@wopr:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sd[ab]
Password:
/dev/sda: Maxtor 6V250F0                          : 43°C
/dev/sdb: Maxtor 6V250F0                          : 43°C
Posted in Advocacy, Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 24 Comments

What are you using machines for

By | Published: April 13, 2007
Paul asks "What are you using machines for" on his blog. Being a geek I have a relatively large number of computers (compared with the average person), but probably not as many or as varied as other geeks. I'd be interested to see how my setup compares to some others. Here's the current setup at popey towers:-
Posted in Advocacy, Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 9 Comments