DevelopingChris

Ubuntu decided to put its buttons on the left. They have chosen their side in PC vs Mac. In any case you can run 1 command to get them back. Only some apps are affected, making it really awkward to have any windows with the x on teh left.

gconftool-2 –type string –set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

Run this command in your terminal and it puts them on the right, in the same order min max close, as windows uses. Just one of the few things I’ve had to do more than 1 time in my upgrade of a few machines to ubuntu.

Hopefully its easier to find later.

Many php applications have compatibility issues with php 5.3.1. Unfortunately in that is the only version currently available in the aptitude repositories for the latest version of Ubuntu.

Once you have either freshly installed Ubuntu and php, or after you update just your distro and do an apt-get update, you will be on 5.3. There are lots of people with this problem. Many of them have solutions. Most involve running lots of terse commands. Then I ran across this shell script that once you have everything installed for php 5.3 will downgrade your stack to 5.2.10 for you. Since I’ve had trouble finding the original source after a few days, here’s the source in case you need it.

#! /bin/sh
php_packages=dpkg -l | grep php | awk '{print $2}'


sudo apt-get remove $php_packages

sed s/lucid/karmic/g /etc/apt/sources.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/preferences.d/

for package in $php_packages;
do echo "Package: $package
Pin: release a=karmic
Pin-Priority: 991
" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/php
done

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install $php_packages

I’ve been in search of a new laptop. One of the things I wanted was linux as the primary boot OS with windows as either a dual boot or a VM.

In my search for the appropriate configuration I’ve played with Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support release. It fixes most of my problems with earlier releases, except when the laptop wakes up from lid closing, it refuses to not only connect to wireless networks, it tells me there is no wireless devices. At this point the light that tells you your wireless is off/on, is stuck at on, and can’t be changed.

I’m looking into possible solutions. Many people in the know say that open Suse has much better support for laptops, including lid closing. I have to get this solved ASAP, I’ll update this post with my findings.

UPDATE: It turns out to be a network driver issue with this model of hardware. If you are looking at a machine with Atheros networking, just don’t. Also if you don’t have a sufficient swap file suspend and hibernate get even weirder. Maybe I’m just a newb on how hibernate/suspend work but that was news to me that having a swap file, larger than your ram was required.