I, for one, cannot wait the 5.5 years for Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenophobic Xorn".

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Last week I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” to 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”. The word “upgrade” here is misleading, since I chose to reformat to take advantage of filesystem changes. However, I imported much of my customisations from backup. Here are my notes on Lucid, from the ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

As of Ubuntu Lucid, the Sun Java JRE has been replaced with OpenJDK. Unfortunately, OpenJDK still isn’t a complete drop-in replacement for Sun Java. For instance, the Facebook “Upload Photos” applet doesn’t work correctly; the photos don’t have thumbnails and can’t be rotated before ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

One of the awesome features of the last several Ubuntu releases is support for ecryptfs, an encrypted filesystem. At Talia we depend heavily on GPG, OTR, SSH keys and other forms of encryption and secure identification. Loss of those keys and other confidential data to laptop ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Update 2010-05-02: See this comment.

I read an article in the Dec 2009 issue of Linux Magazine, one of several Linux-focused magazines we get at the office. I’d like to link directly to it, but it the magazine’s own website doesn’t offer the article or even a reliable permanent ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

You really shouldn’t allow SSH logins via password. This is doubly true for root. On most of my hosts we allow SSH for normal users with a password, but restrict root to SSH keys only. And we always protect against brute force attacks with fail2ban.

If you aren’t already using ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

As I mentioned in my last post, I now have a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Want to look under the hood?

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I recently bought a Shuttle X27D to use as a Home Theater PC (HTPC). The reviews of this hardware run from disappointing to average, but I’m reasonably happy with it. It’s quiet (just one small fan for the GPU, and none for CPU, case, or power supply), uses little power (I ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I recently posted about backporting packages with pbuilder. Someone asked about forward porting PHP4, which is a huge task. PHP4 is out of date, and the entire set of PHP4 libraries has a lot of build dependencies, including some packages you must build yourself. I’m not going to ( Read more... )

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Finally, finally, FINALLY! The Sun Java plugin now works on Firefox amd64 in native 64-bit. It has already been included in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, but the packages work just fine on Hardy as well, and probably on Intrepid.

Just download and install the Jaunty versions of sun-java6- ( Read more... )