Replace Unity with AWN and Gnome-Do

Unity Sucks, and I don’t like it. I prefer a combination of Avant Window Navigator, tilda, and Gnome-Do, to go from this ** to this ** Now, I haven’t kept track of all of the changes I’ve made to my configuration files, so YMMV, but gnome-do and Avant have remarkably good GUI configuration tools, so customise to your hearts content! Get rid of Unity sudo apt-get remove unity unity-asset-pool unity-place-applications unity-place-applications ...

June 28, 2011 · Andrew Bolster

Citrix Web Client with Ubuntu

Ubuntu is one of those polarising technologies; Its really easy to use on a recreational basis, or as part of a institution/business wide rollout, but heartbreakingly awkward to use ‘alone’ within an entrenched business setting. One such setting is that of Queen’s University; the only form of secure remote access that is made (quietly) availiable is through a Citrix XenApp gateway. Great in theory; everyone can take a slice of a virtualized desktop, do whatever they need to do, and that processing power and memory can be easially reappropriated when they’re done. Unfortunately, in an effort to be ‘secure’, you HAVE to use Windows, and you HAVE to have Internet Explorer installed, and you HAVE to install the propitiatory XenApp client. ...

July 24, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Intel 4965: Poor wireless performance under Ubuntu

I had an incident recently where the Windows 7 side of my laptop connected easily to an open AP, but the Ubuntu 10.04 (or 9.04, tried both) wouldn’t, with the Intel Iwlagn drivers reporting in syslog a deauth (reason=6), basically the card spoke too soon. I eventually found the solution. After several weeks of asking the same question everywhere I could think of (as well as emailing Intel…) I found the answer a lot closer to home, from a PhD student ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Graduate in my University over LinkedIn (Ironically enough, I’m actually working with him on my Final Year Project next year… Good stuff to come :D ) ...

July 8, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Customised User Directories in Ubuntu

I’ve been doing alot of messing around in Ubuntu recently and there are lots of tweaks I like to make. One of them being to show the contents of my home folder as my desktop; I don’t need any more pointless folders…. Dead easy, there is a .config directory under your $HOME dir, containing several files. The one we need is user-dirs.dirs , and it looks something like this. # This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update # If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're # interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run # Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped # homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an # absolute path. No other format is supported. # XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop" XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads" XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates" XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public" XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents" XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music" XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures" XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos" And this is what I changed mine to ...

June 1, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Automagic Kernel Cleaning under Ubuntu

Sick of having dozens of old kernels sitting under your /boot/ dir? Want a simpler boot-life? Well we’ve got the solution for you. Just one course of cleankernel once an upgrade cycle will remove all previous kernel entries from your bootloader and /boot/ dir. Basically, it lists what kernels you currently have in your /boot/ and removes them using apt .

May 31, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Coming Soon!

EDIT - 2017 Updated broken links thanks to heads up from Paul @ Art of Blog Ok, its been a busy few weeks, and I’ve let the blog slip again, but coming up: Implementing Google Webfonts Ubuntu Dot-File Dropbox Synchronisation Drupal 6 Installation of Ubuntu 10.04 My Revision Scheduling/Tracking System Summer Plans including VPN work for Dr David Laverty and CUDA research with Alastair Mckinley and Dr Alan Marshall

May 20, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Ubuntu Boosting Blog Hits

I had a bit of a surprise logging into my weekly stats-fest that is my Google Analytics account; 300% rise in Search Based traffic. My daily traffic is meagre to say the least but still, to see such a jump on the week-on-week numbers is always a good thing. ** But I, like alot of people in this field, like knowing why! My first thought was that Google had recently sent out a press release governing updated search characteristics, and while I didn’t see anything relevant to my site in particular, its possible that general algorithmic tweaks could have slid me up the rankings. ...

May 4, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Shared Items - 14/04/2010

Ubuntu Server 9.04 Bacula Bweb GUI 8 useful code snippets to get started with WordPress 3.0 ToDoo Tracks Your To-Do List Triumphs and Failures [Downloads] Two Useful Google Chrome Extensions for SEO Guys Intel To Ship 48-Core Test Sytems To Researchers Savevideo.me Downloads Video From YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and More [Ripping] Tagxedo Generates Stunning Custom Word Clouds [Text] What’s Brand? Getting Started with Banner Advertisements How To Stop An Ethical Hacker Breaking Into Your WordPress Site ...

April 14, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Listing just dot-files

Its a problem that I’ve come across, and I’m not the only one, so heres what works for me to find those pesky files that start with a . ls -a | egrep -i "^\." This only works in the current working directory, which is the normal usage. FYI the reason that this is problematic is that the ‘.’ symbol is a single character wildcard; most people are familiar with the asterisk ‘*’ indicating ‘anything, however long’, whereas the ‘.’ means ‘any single character’. ...

April 9, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

The DE Bill, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tor

Folks, we’re basically screwed; The Digital Economy Bill recieved Royal Accent on April 9th and is officially now Law. So after barely three days of parliamentary ‘debate’ where only 20-ish MP’s actually spoke on the subject (but somehow 189 MP’s decided it was a good idea anyway), our civil rights have been sacrificed infront of the alter of copyright. Many sites have a much more indepth tretise on the subject than I could do so I’ll keep this short. ...

April 9, 2010 · Andrew Bolster