Comments for TechnologyTales.com

Comment on A little more freedom by John

John — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:06:06 +0000

Sounds like you’ve had a good experience with your HP, David.
As it happens, I did try getting Ubuntu going on mine using Wubi but it wouldn’t start so I abandoned that approach. So far, I am not brave enough to do the tweaking that you have done though my Toshiba does dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 quite happily and on an upgraded hard drive too. I’ll bear in mind what you ahve done should i decide to give it a go on my dm4.

Comment on A little more freedom by David

David — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:12:14 +0000

I’ve had a dm4 (the 1160us version) for about 8 months now. There’s a minimal install option in the system restore function that loads only Windows and the HP drives, but none of the bloatware at all, which is great — the clean system runs fast.

I did set up mine to dual-boot Linux. All four primary partitions were taken up by the default installation, so I backed up the HP_TOOLS partition and recreated it as a logical partition (there’s also an HP_TOOLS installation file on the HP site), which then let me set up virtual Linux partitions (after shrinking the Windows partition, of course). I also used EasyBCD to set up a boot menu (I put Grub2 in a /boot partition). I keep all my filles on a separate NTFS data partition that’s easily accessible by both operating systems.

Comment on A few thoughts on Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1 by Links 23/1/2012: Desura Game Client Open Source, Megaupload Seizure | Techrights

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:56:13 +0000

[...] A few thoughts on Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1 [...]

Comment on Getting Gnome Shell going for Fedora 16 running in VirtualBox by Naz

Naz — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:11:02 +0000

Thanks for the helpful post.

I noticed that sometimes after running the “restorecon -R -v /opt” and rebooting, the default login manager won’t load.

I went ahead and booted in safe mode, ran the suggested command “restorecon -R -v /opt” again, rebooted, and got the manager to load. Hope this helps somebody.

Comment on Removing the Guest Account Entry from Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 Login Screens by John

John — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:48:19 +0000

I cannot see the point of them either so I wonder who thinks that this improves usability. The same applies to logging into a desktop with no password too.

Comment on Removing the Guest Account Entry from Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 Login Screens by Dirk De Schepper

Dirk De Schepper — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:38:21 +0000

I can’t believe this. Guest accounts? What year is this, 1995? How can a security hole like this exist?

Comment on An in situ upgrade to Linux Mint 12 by Links 13/12/2011: Ubuntu at HMV Stores, Ultimate Edition 3.0 Swaps Ubuntu | Techrights

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:04:28 +0000

[...] An in situ upgrade to Linux Mint 12 Though it isn’t the recommended approach, I have ended up upgrading to Linux Mint 12 from Linux Mint 11 using an in situ route. Having attempted this before with a VirtualBox hosted installation, I am well aware of the possibility of things going wrong. Then, a full re-installation was needed to remedy the situation. With that in mind, I made a number of backups in the case of an emergency fresh installation of the latest release of Linux Mint. Apache and VirtualBox configuration files together with MySQL backups were put where they could be retrieved should that be required. The same applied to the list of installed packages on my system. So far, I haven’t needed to use these but there is no point in taking too many chances. [...]

Comment on Getting Gnome Shell going for Fedora 16 running in VirtualBox by Links 13/12/2011: Ubuntu at HMV Stores, Ultimate Edition 3.0 Swaps Ubuntu | Techrights

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:01:57 +0000

[...] Getting Gnome Shell going for Fedora 16 running in VirtualBox [...]

Comment on An in situ upgrade to Linux Mint 12 by John

John — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:22:48 +0000

Thanks Mike. Doing what you suggest is the recommended way forward but I didn’t fancy the downtime this time around.

Now probably would be a good time to upgrade because any rough behaviour seems to have been eradicated by a few updates since I upgraded. All seems stable with what I am running at the moment, which could not be said for the original state of my system following the upgrade. It ran mostly OK but with the occasional freeze that grew steadily more and more occasional to the point where there is none anymore.

Comment on An in situ upgrade to Linux Mint 12 by Mike

Mike — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 06:14:39 +0000

The easier way is simply to do a backup and then install Linux Mint 12 from a disk over top of your existing installation. This is what you’d have to do for Windows or Mac. Upgrading such a long jump (usually over several versions of upgraded packages) is risky and should only be done by someone who isn’t afraid to break their machine. Having a rolling distro (like Debian Mint) mitigates the problem a little bit, but then you may get the odd package break as you upgrade.

Anyway, the situation is already better for Linux distros than the more mainstream OSs. At least you have a choice.

BTW, thanks for the blog posting. I was wondering if it was a good time to upgrade ;-)