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Thunderbird or Shredder and Lightning compatibility

liuk — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:27:18 +0000

Under Ubuntu, if are you using the latest version of Thunderbird from the PPA (rebranded as Shredder), you may encounter some problems with the Lightning plugin, especially if you are using the 64 bit version.

For example, with Shredder 3.0.6 you have to use the Lightning plug-in version 1.0b1 and not the latest 1.0b2.

For the X86_64 version you may find the archive of the various builds here:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b1/contrib/linux-x86_64/

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Vodafone Mobile Connect for Linux

liuk — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:05:09 +0000

If you have a Vodafone Internet Key and you don’t want to get crazy configuring it, use this really fine package: Vodafone Mobile Connect from Betavine Forge, a Vodafone Group R&D Lab.

It has nice features like:

statistics about transferred bytes (rx/tx)
sending SMS
choosing your preferred network settings (gprs, umts, preferred)
nice Python GUI
automatic detection of your Internet Key
it will not use Network Manager

It will works fine also with recent Internet Keys which need usb_modeswitch.

I’ve tested with a 28.8 Mbps USB Internet Key Model Number K4505 under Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit.

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Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on HP EliteBook 8530p – All is fine!

liuk — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:40:39 +0000

After reading this interesting post on Phoronix about the great increase of performance between ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, I finally convinced myself to make the upgrade.
My first concern was about the ATI driver, which gave me some trouble with 9.04.
Anyway after a good backup, I started the upgrade, and in almost 2 hours I was up and running with 9.10, with a lot of improvements!
The upgrade installed automagically the fglrx driver version 2:8.660, my previous version (built from source) was 2:8.620, however, after the first reboot I started in recovery mode to issue the magic command “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” because I feel that this is still crucial to make the driver work.
After this safety measure, I rebooted and really appreciated the boot speed! Upstart is making a great job really!
So far, I’m very impressed by this release, my major benefits are the following:

Ultra fast boot and shutdown
Great performance of the ATI driver. The black areas that sometimes were appearing for example scrolling a Firefox full screen window have disappeared
Upgrading Skype to 2.1.0.81 solved the problem about the editing of my profile and avatar display
Performance are really increased, for example opening PDF with Evince
Not yet tested printing feature
Suspend to ram works fine
VMware Workstation works fine

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Shiretoko IS Firefox, it’s only a User Agent issue

liuk — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:51:15 +0000

On my Ubunty Jaunty I’ve started to use the latest Firefox build using this PPA:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
but the Ubuntu Mozilla Team has decided to rebrand it as Shiretoko, and this seems to break some sites which relies on the User Agent string. Using the User Agent Switcher add-on for Shiretoko, ops… Firefox, is a nice trick. Another option is to use Ubuntuzilla.

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Testing Drivel

liuk — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:14:18 +0000

This is a test post using Drivel.

Does it work?

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ATI Linux Proprietary Driver – Catalyst 9.8 RELEASED

liuk — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:15:02 +0000

It is available for download here (64 bit platform).

Updated instructions for Ubuntu installation are as always here.

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Ubuntu Jaunty on HP EliteBook 8530p – All Issues Solved!

liuk — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:04:04 +0000

All the issues described in my previous post about Ubuntu Jaunty (64 bit) upgrade have been solved! Yeppa!

ATI Video Card – WORKS. The ATI Catalyst driver 9.6 and 9.5 work fine. You can read more about it here. Download the source of the driver from the ATI site and follow the instructions for building the Debian packages. With the 9.5 driver it was mandatory to use “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” (read about it here). While waiting the release of the new ATI driver I’ve successfully configured the radeonhd driver 1.2.5 from this PPA and following the instructions from x.org here. You will have to rebuild the drm module for the current kernel (beware of kernel updates). Unfortunately the OpenSource driver does not support 3D acceleration yet.
Garbaged Printing with some black squares. It seems an issue of foomatic-db-engine. I think that there isn’t an official fix for this, currenty there is only a workaround here (see comment #84 from Till Kamppeter). Download the pdftops filter and replace your current /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops from the cups packaage.
Battery duration. Now the uptime on battery is back to more than 3 hours like on 8.10. The problem is that the radeonhd driver is not able to optimize the ATI card for battery duration like the fglrx does. With the radeonhd driver there the Thermal Zone 2 always between 55 and 62 degrees (look at it with “acpi -t”), while with the fglrx driver it stays at 44-45. The strange thing is that even without X running the video card is heating, I suppose a BIOS issue.

So now I can enjoy all the Jaunty wonders! New notifications, faster boot and shutdown, a reliable suspend/resume.

((enjoy))