Notes
From Sven Kreiss
[edit] UoE Physics LaTeX styles
Notes about LaTeX and JaxoDraw.
[edit] Compare server download and torrent
When downloading the latest Ubuntu liveCD, I saw this:
The server got slow after 75% were downloaded. In my UK flat, I can download up to 8MBit, i.e. 8 min per CD. Back home in Germany, the download is 128kBit max, i.e. over 2 hours per CD. When your download stops after 75%, you get really annoyed.
I think this makes it quite clear that torrents are an extremely useful technology that got bad press for being used for wrong things. It can be powerful when integrated properly in the desktop.
[edit] wbxml Patch
This one is a bit longer so it has its own page: wbxml patch for Ubuntu Intrepid
The purpose is to get opensync running by using a patched version of wbxml. By now this text is outdated as the patch has now been included in Ubuntu.
[edit] Skype, Ubuntu and built in Microphones
I got a new laptop a couple of months ago and installed Ubuntu 8.04 a while back. All works really nice. I have a Bluetooth stereo headset and finally wanted to get it to work with Skype. No luck. Bluetooth audio is a big mess in Ubuntu. At least I am not patient enough to set it up properly. While I was playing around in Skype, someone called me and I picked up. I was prepared to being yelled at for poor microphone quality and feedback as I wasn't using a headset. But nothing. Turns out that these two digital microphones at the top of the lid make a huge difference compared to the old-style built in microphones with which only picked up the noise of the fans. As it turns out, I do not need my Bluetooth headset any more. At least not for Skype. It is pretty awesome. I can now talk to my laptop without being wired to it. Very nice.
[edit] Eagle transparency problems with compiz
After the switch to compiz-fusion, I could not use Cadsoft's Eagle anymore. Apparently I ran into this bug: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=227337
Using export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 and opening eagle from the same terminal solved the problem for me.
[edit] OpenOffice Calc Alternating Background
There is an excellent description at http://www.openofficetips.com/category/using-openoffice-calc/page/3/ which describes how to get alternating background colours in an OpenOffice Spreadsheet. I would like it to be simpler (like a single button for it), but this is the easiest -- and once you know it very quick -- method to get alternating background colours. Look at the flash animation for a step-by-step description.
[edit] Suggestions for improvement
Have style for your table content, e.g. Default, and create a second style, e.g. Default_dark which is "Linked with" Default. Only change the background of Default_dark. The conditional formatting then can be applied with two conditions:
- First condition: mod(row();2)=1 will be Default_dark.
- Second condition: mod(row()+1;2)=1 will be Default.
[edit] Hardware Sensors Monitor
I had a couple of system freezes on my Ubuntu machine and at first I blamed my swap partition for it which got mounted twice. Apparently, this was not the reason for my crashes. I hope I found the source of the problem now: It seems that the Hardware Sensors Monitor was responsible for crashing my gnome-panels from time to time which lead to a complete system freeze. Not too sure whether this was the reason, but so far, my system seems to be stable again.
[edit] 31/05/07 - Testing EmbedVideo Extension
| Multi-touch presentation. | Evolution of dance. | Pantomime. |
| Compiz Fusion rocks! | Finite Simple Group | Kill -9 |
[edit] 22/05/07 - Permanent Changes in GRUB
When I installed Dapper, I needed the option vga=771 for the splash to work. That changed during some update and I had to remove it. The annoying thing is, that it changed back to vga=771 each time a new kernel was installed. To remove it permanently do not change the boot menu entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst directly. The right thing to do is to change this line:
# kopt=root=UUID=some numbers ro vga=771
Although it is a comment, it is used by the debian update-grub script. So try and remove vga=771 in this line and do
sudo update-grub
afterwards. Now, your menu entries should not have a vga=771 anymore.
I guess similar irritations occur with other options. The important bit is that options with a single hash are not comments to the update-grub script which is run after each kernel update.
[edit] 01/05/07 - Cadsoft's Eagle
It just took me an hour to find the name of the ulp-script I used a while ago to create Bill of Materials (BOM) with eagle. Now I found it: bom-am-11.ulp from http://www.cadsoft.de/download.htm