A simple matter of…

Recently, X.Org has been removing HAL from the requirement list. This is good except that it means reconfiguring things. Again.
I have a Logitech G7 mouse and it has a side button which defaults to “back”. I like it remapped to “middle button” (which pastes text in Unix). I used to use a [...]

Whilst playing with the puppet-dashboard I noticed some warning notices in my puppetmaster logs. Now all file resource types must prefix “module” (although templates don’t need to!).
It’s only a small change, but please can these things be done a bit more sanely? By this I mean a documented approach to [...]

Today I had my first real trial of Ubuntu netbook remix (9.10). This is an an Eeepc 1008HA netbook.
Netbook remix has a nice “launcher” which takes over the whole screen and uses large buttons. This is great for me as I can’t use trackpads at all The [...]

I’ve been a keen Linux user for just shy of fifteen years now and there have been many, many changes, but I’m just going to look at the “desktop” side and see how things have changed (or not).
“Out of the box” - this has drastically improved. Sound normally works now and general hardware support [...]

Pulseaudio seems to cause many, many problems for a lot of people. Unfortunately that’s partly the nature of audio applications on Linux. Let me explain. Only one program can talk to the soundcard at once - so you can either listen to OGGs/MP3s or get IM “ping”s, but not both. Obviously [...]

After reading this article I decided to give it a go.
First of all, the import from firefox doesn’t import passwords so until that happens I’m not going to cut over. It certainly seems nice and quick - however I really dislike the Chrome interface personally even if it does reduce the (small) amount [...]

I often think that Java has the worst case of NIH syndrome I’ve ever seen. At other times it’s due to the way it chooses to do things. However that’s little excuse in my opinion - “so don’t do that then” is one possible answer. “Think of the children” (or rather “think of [...]

Just added TLS to my mail server and whilst I was at it, SASL AUTH (via dovecot). The latter was very easy, the former was also pretty simple after I read the big document I’m not authenticating clients via TLS - it’s possible, but SASL AUTH is a better solution for [...]

Never has a source control system been more aptly named. git is amazingly cool and powerful, however it also possesses a steep learning curve.
I’m now happily using it in a basic fashion - one central repository, an edge repository on my laptop and desktop.
You really do need to spend a bit of [...]

These last couple of weeks I’ve been setting the new virtualisation infrastructure at work. Xen is dead, long live KVM. Only KVM tools are horrifically immature. So for example:
- virsh can’t shutdown KVM domains
- virt-manager can’t do, well pretty much anything - start/stop/show console is about it
- libvirt’s XML is badly documented, has [...]