Ubuntu

So Diablo has been released. Wasting no time I set about installing the new SDK under my distribution of choice, Ubuntu Hardy. The process is pretty painless thanks to the installer scripts but there are a few little gotcha's that you need to look out for.

Whist reading through my daily deluge of email, a promotion from the UK based company Novatech caught my attention. It seems that online retailers such as Novatech are finally seeing the benefits of supplying Ubuntu certified computers to customers and knocking down their prices, a big win for all involved. The next part of the email made me chuckle to myself.

It seems that totem is broken quite badly on Ubuntu Hardy Heron at the moment. Video playback stutters along at around 0.25 frames a second and totem itself seg faults after clicking the seek bar a few times. Bug duly filed as part of an existing bug which I think is related.

You can see below the current state of totem on my laptop.

We have VPN (Virtual Private Network) access at work which I use often when I need to get at files whist I'm at home or abroad. To use VPN under Ubuntu Linux is simple; all you need to do is install pptp support for network manager to enable VPN support. Run the following command in an xterm:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp
sudo killall nm-applet
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart
nm-applet –sm-disable &

Left click on the network manager applet on the top right of your desktop and select VPN Connections->Configure VPN. From here configure your VPN details as normal. To connect to your newly setup VPN left click on the network manager applet again and select VPN Connections->your_vpn_connection.

Voila.

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Beta works great on my laptop of choice, the Dell XPS M1330 but one of the issues I came across was with the finger print reader. This does work but not out of the box.

One thing that caught me out was that Hardy comes with partial support via thinkfinger-tools which in the end caused me a problem. After reading that thinkfinger-tools was in the repo's I installed it using apt-get. Then I followed the excellent tutorial over on the Ubuntu wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinkFinger . This looked promising as everywhere a password was required it would also ask for a finger swipe instead. The only problem was that it wouldn't accept the finger swipe no matter what I did.

To cut a long story short, the source install conflicted with the version apt-get installed. A quick apt-get remove thinkfinger-tools and an installation from source again as per the wiki page worked a treat. I now have a working finger print reader.