Penguin

Miscellaneous notes for Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy)

No "splash" image on boot

If you dist-upgrade from Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) rather than installing 5.10, you might not get the new graphical splash screen during boot. This can be caused by the order that packages are upgraded -- the usplash package is needed before installing and setting up the LinuxKernel image. Ubuntu's Kernel uses an InitialRamDisk, and this needs to be recreated after usplash is installed. Anyway, the following command will do what you need:

dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-`uname -r`

(`uname -r` will substitute in the current kernel release. Those are backquotes, the key under <esc>, not ordinary single quotes.)

That recreates the /boot/initrd.img-... file to use the splash image.

Proprietary module for NVidia graphics cards

To get proper 3D/OpenGL hardware acceleration, see NvidiaDriverHowto.

Sucky default "X Resources"

GNOME uses X resources (via xrdb(1)?) to try to make older X11 programs look like the current GTK theme. However, figuring out where these are set is very difficult. GNOME's gnome-settings-daemon is responsible for loading default X resources files. In Ubuntu 5.10, these are the files in /etc/gnome/config/*. For example, the General.ad sets default foreground and background colours for all X apps, and this is what makes xterm(1) default to black-on-white. (In Gentoo, these files are in /usr/share/control-center-2.0/xrdb.)

You can also manually override all these settings yourself via the xrdb program, but any time the gnome-settings-daemon reloads, the defaults will be reloaded.

Can't change virtual consoles in X

If you have done a dist-upgrade from Debian Sarge or Sid to Ubuntu 5.10, you may have noticed that you can no longer use Alt+Ctrl+[1-6] to change virtual consoles. This is a consequence of the switchover from xfree to xorg - in Debian, /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/pc is a directory while in Breezy it is a file. When Xorg can't load this file, it doesn't know what to do with some key codes. Delete this directory and copy this file over from another Breezy computer, or re-install the "xkeyboard-config" package. To re-install, you'll probably need to do something like

dpkg --force-depends --purge xkeyboard-config
apt-get install xkeyboard-config

(By using dpkg --force-depends instead of apt-get or aptitude you won't end up removing other X and ubuntu-desktop packages). Once this file is properly installed, "/etc/init.d/gdm restart" is needed to get X to use it.

Setting up Mozilla Thunderbird to work with Hotmail

My girlfriend likes hotmail (sigh) Luckily, I think she mostly just likes her hotmail address.

Anyway, I managed to get hotmail and thunderbird working together on her ubuntu-running laptop.

I made sure she's running the latest version (breezy) and just apt-got the necessary stuff :

apt-get install hotway

That part was easy. There's no real configuration you need to do, but this isn't so secure.. you might want to edit hosts.allow & hosts.deny to tighten things a little.

I made sure inetd was installed and running (though xinetd may be preferable? whatever works) as it wasn't installed by default.

apt-get install inetd

Then just point your mail client to 127.0.0.1 (or hostname or localhost.localdomain)and port 110 ; enter your full hotmail address (e.g. hotmailuser@hotmail.com) and hotmail password.

Start getting your hotmail!

:)


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