Last month I ditched rdiff-backup (which saved my bacon on a number of occasions) for CrashPlan+ with the Family Unlimited plan so I can backup all of our computers (one Ubuntu desktop, two Macs) locally and offsite. Used their seed service. Already had to do a small restore. Love it. Works great. The only problem I’ve [...]

I’ve been itching for this for a long time but never got up the steam to actually go find out how to do it until today. You can type special characters (accented characters, special punctuation, etc.) directly from the keyboard by following this handy guide. (Shift+AltGr means press the Left Shift and Right Alt key [...]

Update: Thanks for your help, everybody. No more testers needed. I’ll be releasing it soon. Over the weekend I created a photo uploader for Linux, specifically for Gnome desktop users: I’m looking for some people who can install and try the package out before I release it publicly. Ideally I’d like several people to run [...]

I’ll try to keep this brief but I wanted to post it because I couldn’t find exactly this procedure anywhere online. Here’s my situation: when I installed Ubuntu I didn’t just repartition my Windows drive—I added a whole new hard drive for it. So I ended up with Windows XP on /dev/sda1 and Ubuntu on [...]

On January 30th 2007 I installed Ubuntu Linux on my computer intending to use it as my primary operating system. I wrote about the surprises of that switch (both happy and vexing) in a four-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) in March. It’s been very nearly a year now and I’m [...]

[ On January 30th I installed Ubuntu Linux and decided to give it a serious try. Read Part 1 for an introduction including my reasons for doing this. Part 2 covers my installation experience. And Part 3 was all about finding and using replacement applications. ] Folks, it’s been a fun and sometimes woolly ride. [...]

[ On January 30th I installed Ubuntu Linux and decided to give it a serious try. Read Part 1 for an introduction including my reasons for doing this. Part 2 covers my installation experience. ] I’ve heard that installing software on Linux is very difficult. That may have been true once but it is a [...]

[ On January 30th I installed Ubuntu Linux and decided to give it a serious try. Read Part 1 for an introduction including my reasons for doing this. ] If you’ve never installed a modern Linux distribution and you’re worried about how difficult it will be because you’ve heard awful stories about the process, let [...]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found that the saying “it just works” is about as useful as saying that airplanes “just fly.” It’s an easy thing to say until you have to learn to pilot one. Foreign languages also “just work.” But have you ever tried to learn one? Linux is like that. That’s [...]