words by Brian Racer
This is basically just a repost of the same issue I had when Karmic Koala launched
Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) launched today and I figured it was time to do an install from scratch onto my Dell D830 Latitude laptop. Everything went quite smoothly but when it started up I noticed two issues:
Problem 1: No wireless
I know the Broadcom card inside the laptop isn’t the greatest, but the last two Ubuntu releases it has worked out of the box. The following command enabled the card after a reboot:
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
Problem 2: Really slow DNS lookups (because of IPV6)
As documented on Launchpad, there still doesn’t seem to be an official fix. Strangely disabling IPV6 in /etc/sysctl.conf didn’t solve anything, however disabling it in Firefox at least fixes the issue in the browser. Just type about:config in the address bar, and set network.dns.disableIPv6 to false.
words by Brian Racer
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) launched today and I figured it was time to do an install from scratch onto my Dell D830 Latitude laptop. Everything went quite smoothly but when it started up I noticed two issues:
Problem 1: No wireless
I know the Broadcom card inside the laptop isn’t the greatest, but the last two Ubuntu releases it has worked out of the box. The following command enabled the card after a reboot:
sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
Problem 2: Really slow DNS lookups (because of IPV6)
As documented on Launchpad, there still doesn’t seem to be an official fix. Strangely disabling IPV6 in /etc/sysctl.conf didn’t solve anything, however disabling it in Firefox at least fixes the issue in the browser. Just type about:config in the address bar, and set network.dns.disableIPv6 to false.
Otherwise things seem to be working well, although I don’t understand why they stick with a color scheme that looks like mud.
words by Brian Racer
OS X has a neat command-line tool called pbcopy which takes the standard input and places it in the clipboard to paste into other applications.
In Ubuntu(or any Linux distro with Xwindows), a similar tool is xclip. I like to make this alias:
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'
or the following also works if you would rather use xsel:
alias pbcopy='xsel --clipboard --input'
alias pbpaste='xsel --clipboard --output'
Now you can pipe any text to pbcopy
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | pbcopy
Your public ssh key is transferred to your clipboard and is ready to be pasted(perhaps with pbpaste).
words by Brian Racer
I use a pretty generic Gnome + Compiz desktop setup in Ubuntu, but one thing that really irks me is my applications always seem to start snapped to a corner. What I really want is for them to open centered on my desktop. You can achieve this by doing a little registry modification(I’m pretty sure there is a nice GUI app to adjust these settings, but I don’t believe it is installed by default).
Press Alt+F2 and enter gconf-config. This will open up Gnome’s registry editor.
Set the following two values:
Key: /apps/metacity/general/focus_new_windows Value: smart
Key: /apps/compiz/plugins/place/screen0/options/mode Value: 1
Now your applications should start up nice and centered 
words by Brian Racer
Ubuntu’s current release version of Firefox 3.5 is named Shiretoko and sends a user-agent of Shiretoko/3.5 rather than Firefox/3.5. This broke a number of sites I use that rely on browser sniffing such as Facebook Chat and DailyMotion. There are two ways to adjust this behavior:
1) Type about:config in the address bar. Search for ‘general.useragent.extra.firefox’. Double click “Shiretoko/3.5″ replace it with “Firefox/3.5″
2) Use the User Agent Switcher plugin. This I prefer this option as it also lets me set IE user agents so I can use a few sites that think they require IE, and also set iPhone header’s for development.
words by Brian Racer
Recently I used GParted to resize an NTFS disk to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows XP. I finished the Ubuntu installation and everything seemed to be working fine until I tried to boot back into XP. Windows reported there might be disk corruption, ran chkdsk, and chkdsk ended up freezing. I rebooted again and saw that the grub bootloader was now also freezing. Delightful. Although I didn’t think chkdsk modified the MBR, upon further research in some cases it does(when run with the /r switch) and in this case ends up corrupting the MBR. To fix this issue you can perform the following:
Boot with an Ubuntu Live CD and open up a terminal.
sudo grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
Note the hdx number and partition number to it’s right. Now type the following commands into the grub prompt:
grub> root (hdx, y)
grub> setup (hdx)
grub> quit
Note whitespace is important here. Now you can reboot. When Windows asks to run chkdsk hit a key to cancel. Once in Windows, open a command prompt and type:
This will schedule a disk check on reboot that will not alter the MBR. Reboot and allow the disk check to complete. It may automatically reboot your system again, but once that is finished both OS’s should boot fine from now on.
