Last weekend I did the most stupid thing you can do when a new version of Ubuntu is released: upgrade. At least until things have calmed down a bit. Anyway, I didn't have much to lose, as things have been on a steady decline since the last LTS release.

My …

In Ubuntu's Unity, you get four workspaces per screen, arranged in two rows with two columns each. Fortunately, there's a way to get more desktop space, but in Ubuntu 11.10 it takes a bit of searching.

After clicking around for 20 minutes, I finally found a menu in compiz' …

I'm currently setting up my new Laptop with Ubuntu Natty. Apart from all the things I hate in Unity (the list is long), there's one recurring annoyance: the blinking cursor in Gnome Terminal. There's no menu setting to disable it, but fortunately, there's still a way to fix it.

You …

Despite all the problems I had with Ubuntu updates over the last couple of years, I decided to update my work machine to Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty Narwhal"). I expected problems and I wasn't disappointed, after the upgrade I was left standing in the dark, without X.

Fortunately, the rest …

When I'm at my desk I use an external LCD monitor with my netbook. I'm glad that switching displays finally works on Linux, but even on Ubuntu it takes a lot of clicks in the Monitors menu. Fortunately, I found a way to map this to keyboard shortcuts.

The following …

Half a year ago, I bought an Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook. The first thing I did was wiping Windows XP off the disk and installing Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix. When I bought the netbook, I knew support for the wireless chip (AR928X, according to lspci) was limited, but things …

Once in a while, I install Python packages from source using distutils. The distutils-powered setup.py script found in many packages installs software in /usr/local/ - quite useful because it doesn't interfere with packages managed by your distribution. Since Ubuntu Jaunty and Python 2.6, this doesn't work anymore.

Previously …

Upgrading from Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" to "Intrepid Ibex" wasn't the smooth ride I was used to. I'm a pretty happy Ubuntu user and my system (an old Acer Travelmate 291) has been running all Ubuntu releases since "Breezy Badger" without a single reinstall. This time, however, I experienced problems with …

When I wanted to suspend my notebook today the hibernate button was gone from the menu. Running the /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh shell script as root still worked, but there was no way to get that silly button back.

My first idea was some kind of configuration trouble, suddenly appearing …