Linux Sanity | JournalXtra

Kubuntu 11.10 – A Very Early Review

July 28, 2011 by Lee hodson 18 Comments

Is Ocelot ready to pounce? Or is it all oneiric? In the twilight hours of this morning, I thought I'd take a look at the new Kubuntu 11.10, codenamed "Oneiric Ocelot". Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, in my half-awake non-caffeinated state. Knowing how much you all dislike Ubuntu Unity and how many of you might be considering a change to Kubuntu, I thought you might like a non-technical peek review of Oneiric. I downloaded the 32bit iso from Ubuntu, created a virtual machine in VirtualBox, loaded the iso and booted the machine. Within a couple of seconds I was looking at … [Read more...]

Faster, Safer, Ad Free Browsing with a Little Domain Blocking

July 26, 2011 by Lee hodson Leave a Comment

Protecting your computer's wire tentacles from getting tangled up with the Internet's less savory sites can be as simple as pasting a few lines of code into a file. Want to stop your teenage son or daughter downloading games to your computer? Want to stop your husband from watching porn? (we all know the computer forced him to watch it, right?) Or do you want to block all the ads that slow down your Internet browsing? All the above is easily done. You can even kill access to online casinos. In fact, you can block access to any site, even Google, Bing or Facebook, if you want to. All … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Computing, Linux Sanity Tagged With: ad blocking, blocking malicious websites, domain blocking, hosts file, linux, protecting your computer, website blocking, windows

Install FUSE into Ubuntu the Easy Way – Use a Script

July 26, 2011 by Lee hodson 1 Comment

Manic Miner on Fuse Making friendly suggestions on a forum is not always a good idea: you never know where it's going to lead. When I saw a request for feature ideas for upcoming versions of FUSE, the Spectrum emulator, posted on the World of Spectrum website little did I know that one simple comment asking for FUSE to be made easier to install into Ubuntu would lead me to write an installer script. When someone on the forum wrote "hint, hint, hint: man bash. you really can contribute that bash one-liner to FUSE then. %-)" in reply to my writing "[as] much as I'd like to give FUSE more … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bash, EasyGuides, Linux Sanity, Scripts Tagged With: bash, bleeding edge FUSE, emulator, FUSE, installer script, libpng, libspectrum, linux, Source code, Ubuntu, world of spectrum

OMG! Unity is Horrible! What Do I Do?

April 18, 2011 by Lee hodson 6 Comments

Changing Ubuntu Natty Unity to Ubuntu Classic

If the search terms that have been bringing visitors to my first review of Ubuntu 11.04 are to be used as a measure of what people think of Natty then I would be understating when I say that not many Ubuntu users are happy with Ubuntu's new Unity Shell. Let me just say that a lot of people are doing a lot of cussing about Natty. Who can blame them. The taskbar is unmovable, the application menu is a mess and individual window menus are non existent. It just isn't an interface that people can... interface with. 11.04 is, well, natty. There are solutions The least obvious and easiest option … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Linux Sanity Tagged With: default desktop, desktop environments, gnome, linux, session manager, software packages, Ubuntu, unity, xubuntu

Ubuntu 11.04 – What Have They Done?!

April 5, 2011 by Lee hodson 58 Comments

The new installer options for Ubuntu 11.04

My imagination has been racing with ideas about how great Ubuntu 11.04 will be when finally released. Unable to contain my enthusiasm any longer I decided to download Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1 and give it a whirl on my newly built AMD quad core PC. I am absolutely flabbergasted at how shit the new Natty distro is. I can see "natty" becoming a byword for "trash" and when it does "Natty by name, natty by nature." will be this distro's maxim. A long time user and proponent of Ubuntu and all things Linux and open source, I am well placed to say to anyone who intends to install Natty, "Stop! Curb your … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Linux, Linux Sanity, Reviews Tagged With: 11.04, linux, natty, review, Ubuntu, unity

Extra Repositories for All Ubuntu Distros

March 30, 2011 by Lee hodson 4 Comments

Never again worry about searching for extra Ubuntu repositories. From this point on, this will be your one-stop-shop for getting any of the repositories mentioned in JournalXtra posts. Through this page you will have access to repositories for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu and other distros whether running on i386, AMD64 or (to some extent) PPC processors. This post is your gateway to a simple script to write Ubuntu Linux software repositories based on desktop environment, version name and architecture. It works on the basis that different repository URIs used for different Ubuntu … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Linux Sanity, Repositories