Using tmpfs for Security and Speed

I have 3.9GBs of RAM of which Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) hardly touches more than 512MBs so I'm going to move all my temporary files to RAM. This will result in 2 things:

• Reading and writing temporary files will be much faster.
• Temporary files will be more securely removed on shutdown.

Nautilus Thumbnails with Drop Shadows

Replace ugly white bordered thumbnails in nautilus with a drop-shadow effect

nvidia-current Driver Failing to Load

I've had a really odd issue bothering me the entire time that I've been running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). About half the time when I start up my computer I get a message that Ubuntu has failed to load the proprietary nvidia driver and is running in low graphics mode.

Setting Up Lucid Lynx

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, it seems I just don't have the ego required to maintain a regular blog. Oh well, I'll continue posting things that I find interesting at my own pace. Like a lot of my posts are probably going to be, today's post will mostly be for my own benefit. I want to write down all that I did to set up my new install of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). That way if things go wrong I won't have to depend on my terrible memory to set it all back up again.

64 bit GnoMenu

GnoMenu is a fantastic project to get a main menu for Gnome that IMHO looks a little nicer than a plain menu system. Check it out:

Why I Switched Back from Arch to Ubuntu

While I've had a great deal of fun using Arch Linux I've decided to go back to Ubuntu. The biggest reason why? All the recent changes to Linux to create Ubuntu Karmic and the changes being proposed for Ubuntu Lucid. While what can be customize in Arch is fantastic and the wiki, tutorials and community are incredibly helpful, somethings are just too involved to build and too enticing to avoid. But in Ubuntu these things are getting integrated into the default distro so that anyone can use them.

Guide to Setting Up the Perfect Karmic Desktop

Mostly for my own benefit I'm going to describe the process I go through to setup my desktop on a new install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The benefit for myself is that if anything goes horribly wrong, a reinstall becomes incredibly easy as everything I've done is written down in one place.

Favorite Blogs

I love my Google Reader. I follow quite a few blogs and there's no way I would be able to keep track of them all (and stay sane) without it. I thought I'd share some of my favorites today and get you edu-ma-cated.

Fotoxx and kornelix

First off, I have to give a shout out to kornelix, sole developer of the fantastic image editing program fotoxx and other projects. Not only has he developed a light weight, easy to use and amazingly powerful photo editing application, but he's incredibly easy to get a hold of for bug reports and feature requests. And even faster at implementing those changes.

Writeback Journalling

ext3 and ext4 have 3 ways of journalling data: writeback, ordered and journal modes. By default most distros use ordered. However in most cases writeback mode will give faster performance. So I'll show you how to switch over. Check out a more detailed explanation of these journalling options.

Auto-login

Found an interesting post in the Arch Forums on how to auto-login and start X on boot. I wouldn't suggest using this by default (I've only used it to time my preload tests). Depending on where you keep your computer and whether it's a laptop (like mine) that you take out in public, it can be quite a security risk, allowing anyone who can push your power button access to all your files.

Bash aliases and functions

Aliases are a great thing to put into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases file to speed up your use of the command line and functions are even better. So I'm going to share a few that I've collected and created.

HPET problems

I have a Compaq Presario F700 laptop. I love it. The only issue I've run into with it, that's hard ware related, is a weird tendency for the boot process to stutter while under battery power. When not plugged in and booting there are several points where it freezes and I have to press a key to get it to continue booting. This happened both while running Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 and Arch, each with the latest kernel at the time. So I'm pretty sure it isn't software related.

Lightweight Login

I have a fascination with lightweight software. To me they just make sense. Why use a flashier application if all the needed functionality exists in a less resource intensive program?

Preload

Preload is an daemon that monitors which programs you use most often. And when the system is idle it loads them into memory, speeding up their startup times when you do run them.