Thomas Nybergh’s pages

When I recently rented a VPS running a fresh install of Debian, I thought it was about time to stick with the now default Unicode locale, UTF-8. Doing this switch in a sensible fashion would include converting often used text files, such as chat logs from the older, more compatible but limited ISO 8859-15 charset. [...]

Hewlett-Packard has released the source code of AdvFS under the GNU General Public License. AdvFS is an advanced file system (with features such as snapshots and storage pools) used by the company’s high end Tru64 UNIX operating system. This probably means that HP does a lot of business with Linux, and that there really is [...]

For some time, I’ve wanted another blog with a significantly lower threshold for posting short shutouts of those random links that keep me distracted. The source of this text, the notes section on my personal site, should for a number of reasons be kept relatively tidy and reserved for longer posts with my own, original [...]

Something exciting may be going on. Jeff Bonwick, storage expert and leader of the ZFS team at Sun has posted pictures from a seemingly informal meeting with Linus Torvalds on his blog. Sr Program Manager at Sun, Jim Grisanzio also links to the pictures in a blog post of his own titled “ZFS Pics“. Does [...]

After installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I didn’t get any sound when I tried to play sound files in Amarok (the distribution’s own package of version 1.4.9.1), a music oriented audio player/music library for *nix. I fixed this by changing opening Settings – Configure Amarok – Engine and changing the Xine engine’s (no other [...]

The Lexmark E232 laser printer I need to use at the office works for me in Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron) if added in the “System -> Administration -> Printing” as a “Generic PCL 5c Printer” using the “CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.2 Simplified” CUPS driver. In this particular setup, the printer is shared from its USB port [...]

EDIT: This post gets some traffic from Google users who probably are more interested in a later post on fixing a problem causing Ubuntu 8.04′s Amarok not to play any sound. After upgrading to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) I noticed that Amarok (Ubuntu package version 1.4.9.1-0ubuntu3), one of my preferred audio players/music libraries, [...]

The GNOME desktop environment project is plagued by a design philosophy that apparently aims to make user interfaces suitable for lobotomy victims at the cost of removing features and options from the GUI. This has been discussed endlessly elsewhere. Something probably related to this surfaced when I upgraded to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron). [...]

Although the new Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS release is nice and polished, there are a few glitches in how the bundled GNOME environment allows the user to customize some behavior. Settings for how the desktop environment should handle removable media are important for me as I loathe the idea of having to deal with any [...]

(I hate Courier New) For some time, I’ve used Dimitar Zhekov’s clean, fixed-width font Terminus for terminal-heavy situations in both GNU/Linux and Windows. I’m clueless in the area of typography, but Terminus looks oddly appealing when looking at e.g. code (which I don’t write myself), configuration and log files. I keep backup copies of a [...]