mike.mainguy

I'm a long time linux user, I installed my first distro in 1994, it was slackware and required a bunch of floppies and was a fairly painful process. Over the years, I migrated from slackware to redhat and finally settled on Ubuntu as my "daily driver". Every computer in our house (a server, three laptops, and two netbooks) is currently funning a flavor of Ubuntu and I decided to give setting up my work machine (macbook pro) with Ubuntu. The big reason I like Ubuntu is that they are doing a good job of making an operating system (OS) that finds a great balance between "you can do anything you want" and "I just want it to work". Ubuntu has thousands of free software packages that are tested and verified to work that will install with the click of a button. Windows and OSX are so far behind in this regard as to not even be contenders. While there is a little more technical knowledge necessary to get Ubuntu up and running, it typically has so many r...

My internet service provider is a bit dicey and I occasionally need to be on the Internet even when they are figuring out how to reboot their remote router when they lose connectivity. So I thought I would just tether my smartphone (Droid ERIS) to my computer. After a bit of searching, I came up with a couple requirements. I didn't want to root my phone. While this is technically a cool thing to do, I just don't want to do that right now. I need to be able to connect natively to an Ubuntu linux machine. All my computers are currently running ubuntu and I didn't want to screw around with wine or a virtual machine. Enter easytether. In 5 minutes I had internet connectivity... here's what I did: downloaded easytether downloaded the ubuntu driver to the phone connected the phone to the computer (via usb) installed the .deb located in phone's download folder ran easytether on the phone ran "easytether enumerate" on my computer ran "sudo dhc...

I've just started deploying the newest Ubuntu release to the various computers in my house (5 right now + a work VM) and one thing I immediately noticed was that out of the box, the window decorations have moved. They are no longer in the ages old upper right hand corner, but now over in the upper left hand corner. At first I was shocked and a little confused, then I started thinking. Why was I shocked or confused? Other than habit and training, I cannot fathom why the upper right hand side is any better than the upper left. In order to better educate myself I first set out to see why the decorations would be on either side as well as try to figure out the logic behind moving them to the left in the first place. First up, I see in the ubuntu forums a vibrant discussion about the decision to move the icons in the first place as well as future plans to reuse the real estate on the right for other purposes. After some more investigation, I find the ubuntu wiki page explaining the...

We run debian (or ubuntu) as our platform of choice, and largely this is great. If we want software we just apt-get install the package and we're ready to go. The downside is, however, that occasionally a package won't exist (or only an older one will exist). In my case I wanted tomcat 6 on lenny. Previously what we would do is each server install would require a set of instructions to follow (untar foo into bar, symlink this or that, etc). This led to a situation where we had 4 different ways our various server where set up. In order to make this "better", I wanted to build a .deb to make the install/removal/upgrade process easier. I could have done the "right" thing and build the proper package from the source, but it turns out it is relatively simple to build your own .deb binary, so I did this instead. I used these instructions http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/ After about 4 hours (there were some false starts)...