Wednesday, October 24, 2007

One new exciting package that is included in Gutsy is PowerTOP. It is an absolute must if you're running Linux on a laptop, and it's now available from the repositories.

Leave it running for a while (with root rights), and you can see how well (or badly) you're doing to preserve battery power. At the bottom tips will be displayed on what you can do to prevent the top power using entries from occurring. A good idea is to put these suggestions in sysctl.conf and specific commands in /etc/rc.local, as long as they don't cause any problems for you, that is.

After implementing most of the suggestions made by the tool my battery lasted 25% longer then normal, that is a huge improvement.

Friday, October 19, 2007

You must have heard, Gutsy it out! Start your updating engines, in case you haven't already done so the days before the final release.

Upgrade went pretty smooth for me. Then again, I only use official reps (one exception is wine) and only a few .dep files not in any repository. One problem witnessed was right after the upgrade, I couldn't use compiz anymore. On Feisty I had been using the one supplied with Ubuntu and it worked there.

The solution was to run a single command (with root-rights) that adjusts the xorg.conf with a value that is needed by the compiz-fusion version included in Gutsy;

nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24
Each Ubuntu release pushes the envelope a little bit more. Gutsy is certainly high on eye-candy, artwork, better font rendering and the lovely compiz make it all very beautiful to look at.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Can you believe it? The Atari 2600 is 30 years old this October. That little machine started it all for me. For my 10th birthday my parents took me to the store and bought me one (the store ran an action that included a free game of choice!). Actually I got the 'jr' model, which I found cooler then the big wooden 1st version and it included better controllers as well. People wanting to relive the good old times, the popular 'stella' emulator is available. Several years ago I got myself a TV Games 10-in-1 Atari 2600 Joystick, always good for a few laughs at parties.
The game I picked that day was 'Popeye', a platform type of game with pacman influences. It was one of the most difficult games on the 2600 that I know of.