Luckly this is easy to fix, assuming you are using svn. You can use something called auto-props to setup the eol style for different file types.

Set it once for the project, never worry again. Anyone knows its git counterpart?

WTF! My computer is not a tablet, give me back my menu. While using my phone it’s nice to have only a couple of icons to click. With two big monitors, I miss my launch bar, a propper clock, my custom applets and the applications menu… everything that makes the GUI usable.

Luckly Ubuntu provides a way to revert to the “classic” desktop, you just need to apt-get install gnome-session-fallback (WTF? I need to INSTALL it? If you plan to roll out a new experimental GUI, at least let me opt-out without downloading more stuff). Of course, since now Ubuntu comes with Gnome 3 even more fun ensues.

Did you plan to customize your toolbars? Well, good luck with that. Apparently now the applets that work for the old Gnome won’t work for Gnome 3. Yes, they implemented a new cool applet system, whatever, I just want a port of the old ones I had.

Oh, if you plan to move things around you’ll have to do some research first. See that hideous clock up there, in the top bar? How would you get it to the lower-right corner? Why, hold alt and then right click to see the move menu. Super intuitive. I wonder if they inspired themselves on ribbon.

I don’t understand the tablet-interface-ftw fad, I was happy with my console multiplexer and I want to keep it unobtrusive, as gnome 2 was. Time to switch to XFCE?

Assuming you created the installer appropriately (usb, live cd, whatever), once you reached that message it means that the BIOS already recognized your device as bootable, loaded the bootloader and started executing it. So it’s the bootloader that can’t find the image, yet that doesn’t make sense if you think about it carefully: if the installer was properly created, that shouldn’t happen.

Well, after fighting for a while I realized that some DVD drives connected to a high speed SATA port  will give this kind of message error. From the message it’s not very clear what causes it, so you can try with one of the crazy kernel options like noapic. If that doesn’t work, you can try to change the SATA mode in the BIOS. ACHI worked for me.

You might also want to specify that HOST requires USR, instead of $(whoami), so you won’t have to type ssh USR@HOST next time you want a passwordless loggin. This can be done in /etc/ssh/ssh_config, like this:

Replace as needed.

To be completely fair, this is a dual fuckup between Dell and Ubuntu: after an upgrade I started noticing that sometimes the CPU slows to a crawl, for no apparent reason. The only fix for this is a complete shutdown, as not even a reboot would make this problem go away. WTF?

A lot of time after I had given up on trying to solve this problem and decided that submitting to the gods seemingly random will was the best option, a coworker told me what this was about: apparently when you have a 3D GUI (say, a screensaver) and a double monitor the graphics card has to “work too much”, drawing too much power. When the power consumption reaches 90 watts, the power supply’s limit, the CPU enables something called CPU scaling, bringing the CPU clock speed to about the speed of a wristwatch. (No, really: “Even setting aside the negative performance effect of FSB downshifting in II above, the effective processing power is reduced to 1/8 of 798 Mhz = 100 MHz. This is a reduction to less than 5% of full capacity, from http://www.sigmirror.com/files/44490_iweoz/throttlegate.pdf).

Solution? None, thanks. Just shut it down and reboot.

This will remove GDM from the startup scripts, meaning you can still fire up the graphical interface (*) if you want, but it will start Ubuntu without loading any graphics stuff. This is very useful to save on RAM, startup time and processing power, which even if not that useful for a desktop machine is incredible beneficial when you have several virtual machines running in a single physical server.

(*) More precisely, if you have users that need it. Remember though, if it can’t be done in console mode, it ain’t worth doing.

Using something called Compa you can add a meta-widget, that will display the output of any CLI program. This means, of course, that you have all the power of the console to use in your custom made widgets. Need to check your laptop’s battery? No need to search for a widget anymore, just cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state. Need to check the weather? Just wget your favorite forecast page and parse it with grep, sed an awk. OK, maybe that’s a little bit too much.

Once more this proves that anything can be done in console mode – and whatever you can’t isn’t worth doing anyway.

(*) Wow, this article has been written a LONG time ago!

Running that in a bash shell will show the directory listing of C: in machine “host”. Ugly as hell, but it’s a good way of kickstarting a batch script.

Luckily there’s a very easy fix for this problem, just add zero padding in a bash script. How?

That will print all the numbers between 1 and 10. This one will do the same, with zero padding:

If you are on Windows I think you have to install a new map, and then guess where the key would be. Or use an alt+something magic spell. In Ubuntu, it works by default you just need to add a compose key, Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard > Options > compose key position, select right alt (or whatever you fancy), there you go, now it works. Try it by typing alt + ‘ + a.