Ubuntu

I synchronize everything in my documents folder on Linux to a 16 gigabyte SD card on a daily basis. That way, I can have all my homework, assignments, and other assorted school materials with me while I'm am at school, but still be able to keep up-to-date versions on my regularly backed up server for access from my desktop (of course I could mount the drive over sshfs, but the wireless connection on campus isn't up to the task).

In the recent article about extracting the audio from videos I detailed a method to get the audio track from a video. One use for this is extracting the audio of recorded lectures that universities or professors have placed online and are made freely available. Many of these lectures can actually be listened to at a faster speed, reducing the amount of time needed to learn the same material, and while many media players for computers can play audio at a faster speed, this ability is far less common amongst portable media players.

Recently I was working with someone who suspected that their laptop had a virus, and so wanted to do a virus scan. Needless to say, I recommended to them a couple of freely available virus scanners for Windows, but I also recommended that they boot up a LiveCD and run a virus scan from there. Being able to run off a LiveCD for a virus scan ensures that no techniques that the virus can employ on the host operating system to hide itself (such as a rootkit might do) will work.

After quite some time of suffering with my desktop flirting with failure, the sales on Black Friday finally opened up an opportunity for me to upgrade to an i-series Intel CPU on my budget. My desktop now consists of a new motherboard, running an i3 CPU, 8 gigabytes of RAM, and a new power supply capable of driving all that new hardware.

For some reason, trying to update my Ubuntu server with apt-get upgrade often fails to install all the available updates.
In a similar quirk, the default update client for Ubuntu on my laptop usually fails to install updates.
After experimenting with various methods for updating a bit, I finally discovered that by upgrading with Aptitude, I usually could regularly install all the updates.
To upgrade with Aptitude, follow these steps:

Adding to a list of gripes about Ubuntu that I already have, my laptop, running Ubuntu 64 bit, suffers from a strange problem that makes the machine hang in a very strange way - in which nothing works, but the cursor can still be moved around.
Research makes it apparent that this is a problem that occurs on some laptops, which has either to do with the graphics or the wireless card, in other words different machines seem to have the problem caused by different things (or perhaps a combination of those things, which fixing anyone of which solves).

When using that desktop of yours, how often do you need to change networks? Probably not much - I hope you've managed to get a wired connection to that machine, but even if you haven't, you should be on the same wireless network all the time. So why use the Network Manager to configure you network? - after all, it just uses system resources, and doesn't always let you configure things the way you want to. Fortunately, for those intrepid Linux users who are willing to brave a little bit of command line, the solution is simple, if rarely used.

Last night when I booted up a LiveCD of Ubuntu on my HP I found that Ubuntu wouldn't work with my Intel Gigabit Ethernet card. To be sure, this may be a hardware problem, but when I installed the same model and make of card on my server, when replacing the one that died in the lightning strike, I found that it too had problems.

Today I went to boot up the back up server I created from the Dell recently introduced only to discover that it wouldn't boot. After hooking a monitor to it I discovered that BIOS had held it back because the time wasn't set (the motherboard battery needs to be replaced), and after fixing that I let it run - only to discover that it would reach a point at which there was a blinking cursor for a short time, then the monitor displayed that there was no signal.

Every Ubuntu installation since Ubuntu 9.10 installs Grub2 by default. In many ways this is great - Grub2 has a number of new features, and has become more portable and modular than older versions of Grub. The catch is, if you don't need the new features that it provides, it can make life much harder if you ever need to configure grub. My system has often been inconsistent in the way it refers to its hard drives, which means if my hardware configuration changes at all, I have to boot into a live CD/USB to fix the Grub configuration to refer to the correct drive.