Category: free software

dis-unity

The reaction to Ubuntu’s move to Unity seems to be getting wider coverage. Over at LWN, Bruce Byfield blogged recently about the rift between the Ubuntu developers and its users. In particular he highlights Tal Liron’s entry to the Ubuntu launchpad bug wiki under bug number 882274. In that entry, entitled “Community engagement is broken” …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/11/09/dis-unity/

fully minted

image of linux desktop on my netbook

After exploring the alternatives to Ubuntu, I finally settled on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) running Xfce as the desktop. I am now Ubuntu free and have a desktop that looks the way /I/ want it to look rather than the way some design nut wants it to look. I am also hopeful that the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/11/06/fully-minted/

time to ditch ubuntu?

I’ve used Ubuntu on my desktops/laptops and netbook for some time now. I think my first installation was 6.06 (the version 6.04 which was late by two months) and my desktops currently all run 10.04 LTS. I got over the minor irritation of the move of the window control buttons from the top right to …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/10/19/time-to-ditch-ubuntu/

critical security update to wordpress

This blog comes to you courtesy of those excellent free open source authors who have contributed to wordpress. Unfortunately, in common with all software, wordpress inevitably has some bugs. Worse, some of the those bugs can occasionally be sufficiently bad as to make the software vulnerable to remote exploitation by ne’er do wells and other …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/01/04/critical-security-update-to-wordpress/

a graphical web of trust

I recently stumbled upon sig2dot, a gpg/pgp keyring graph generator. In fact this seems to have been around for some time, but I’d never come across it before. It can be used to generate a graph of all of the signature relationships in a GPG/PGP keyring, and, like other visualisation tools, this graphical image producing …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/09/12/a-graphical-web-of-trust/

ubuntu 10.04 – minor, and some not so minor, irritations

If and when the teething problems in 10.04 are fixed and the distro looks stable enough to supplant my current preferred version, I will be faced with one or two usability issues. In this version, canonical have taken some design decisions which seem to have some of the fanbois frothing at the mouth. The most …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/05/02/ubuntu-10-04-minor-and-some-not-so-minor-irritations/

ubuntu 10.04 problems

UNR 10.04 desktop image

The lastest LTS version of ubuntu (10.04, or lucid lynx according to your naming preferences) was released to an eagerly waiting public on 29 April. Long term support (LTS) versions are supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server instead of the usual 18 months for the normal releases. My …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/05/02/ubuntu-10-04-problems/

psp video revisited

image of handbrake gui

I last posted about ripping DVDs to PSP format back in November 2007. Since then I have used a variety of different mechanisms to transcode my DVDs to the MP4 format preferred by my PSP. A couple of years ago I experimented with both winff and a command line front end to ffmpeg called handbrake. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/03/21/psp-video-revisited/

life is too short to use horde

image of postfixadmin page

I own a bunch of different domains and run a mail service on all of them. In the past I have used a variety of different ways of providing mail, from simple pop/imap using dovecot and postfix, through to using the database driven mail service in egroupware. Recently I have consolidated mail for several of …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/01/23/life-is-too-short-to-use-horde/

tor server compromise

According to this post by Roger Dingledine, two tor directory servers were compromised recently. In that post Dingledine said: In early January we discovered that two of the seven directory authorities were compromised (moria1 and gabelmoo), along with metrics.torproject.org, a new server we’d recently set up to serve metrics data and graphs. The three servers …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2010/01/22/tor-server-compromise/

OSS shouldn’t frighten the horses

Since I first read that Nokia were adding much needed telephony capability to their N8x0 range of internet tablets I have been watching the development of the new Nokia N900 with much interest. It looks to be potentially the sort of device I would buy. Despite all the hype around the iPhone, I really dislike …

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Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2009/11/11/oss-shouldnt-frighten-the-horses/