Posted 31 Oct 2006 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu
You might have read my earlier post about (the pain of) upgrading/fresh install from Dapper to Edgy beta and Edgy release candidate in my laptop. I wanted to do a fresh install of Edgy after it was officially released. I downloaded the install CD from Ubuntu download site. I wanted to boot with the live CD to make sure it’s working because the beta and release candidate live CDs didn’t work. I booted with the Edgy live CD and to my surprise it booted fine.
My laptop is a dual boot laptop (Windows XP and Dapper/Edgy beta). I wanted to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop before I upgrade to Edgy since it has accumulated lots of junk, typical for a Windows machine plus I wanted to resize the hard drive partitions. I went ahead and deleted all the partitions and reformatted the hard drive. I then repartitioned my hard drive and installed Windows XP. Once XP installation was done, I wanted to start the Edgy installation. I inserted the Edgy live CD and booted the laptop. To my surprise and horror, the live CD showed distorted screen similar to beta and release candidate live CDs. The live CD booted fine when Edgy was already installed in the laptop. With installed Edgy gone, the live CD was showing a distorted X screen. I couldn’t use that CD to install the system.
I then had to download the alternate install CD which has an option to install in text mode (old non graphical installer). To download alternate CD image, you have to select other installation option in the download mirror sites. Once installed, the installation failed to start the X server as happened before (ATI X1600 mobility radeon card). I tried method 1 in the ATI driver installation guide for Edgy. I rebooted my system and X server didn’t start. I rebooted into recovery mode and then reconfigured my X server using dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. I went with the default selections. After the reconfiguration was done and the changes were written to xorg.conf file, I redid the ATI driver installation. Once that was done, I rebooted and Voila!!! the system started fine. I had to waste almost one full day trying to do the upgrade. Upgrade from Hoary to Dapper was much more faster and smoother.
Several people have complained in Ubuntu forums, Slashdot and other places regarding the issues/problems they encountered while upgrading from Dapper to Edgy. There are couple of blogs (eg: blog1, blog2) blaming Automatix and other issues for upgrade problems. That might be true for some upgrades, but not for all. My fresh install and upgrade options were without any of those that were mentioned in those blogs. My upgrade attempt was from the fresh install of Dapper. Both the upgrade and fresh install failed. It never happened with Dapper or Hoary. Edgy is more buggier than any other Ubuntu release. It’s more like bleeding with pain rather than bleeding edge.
This site has some common upgrade problems and possible solutions for those problems. Give it a try if you encounter any problem while upgrading.
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mpire is an online comparison shopping site written in Ajax. The site helps sellers sell their stuff and buyers to compare and buy. Buyers don’t have to pay anything, but sellers have to pay for the goods they sell through the site. Sellers can also advertise based on the product search results.
It shows search suggestions as you type in the search box which is cool. It takes little time to display the results.
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Apple Computer announced today that Apple’s new iPod® shuffle, the world’s smallest digital music player, will be available in Apple’s retail stores and Apple® Authorized Resellers this Friday, November 3. Nearly half the size of the original, the new iPod shuffle is just half a cubic inch in volume, weighs just half an ounce and features a minimal aluminum design with a built-in clip, making it the most wearable iPod ever.
The new iPod shuffle contains one gigabyte of flash memory which holds up to 240 songs, and is priced at just $79. The new iPod shuffle features up to 12 hours of battery life. Customers can order the iPod shuffle through the Apple Store.
iPod shuffle includes earbud headphones and an iPod shuffle dock. iPod shuffle requires a Mac with a USB 2.0 port and Mac OS® X version 10.3.9 or later and iTunes 7.0.2 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4), Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 2) and iTunes 7.0.2 or later.
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Microsoft is giving it’s Office Accounting Express 2007 for free. You can download the software from Microsoft’s Ideawins website. It’s basically for small business owners to perform the following tasks:
- Create quotes and invoices; track expenses and employee time
- Enter data once and share it seamlessly with other Microsoft Office system programs
- Manage payroll and taxes with ADP’s integrated payroll service
- Store and organize all your customer, vendor, employee, and financial information in one place
- Get business insights with over 20 customizable reports
- Easily share your books with your accountant through Office Live
- List items on eBay, track sales activity, and download and process orders
- Email invoices and get paid faster with PayPal
- Monitor your customers’ business credit in real-time through Equifax
Thanks to downloadsquad
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Today is the last day in Hoary’s life. It’s reaching the end of the cycle today which means it won’t get any security update or support. Canonical announced the date last week. Hoary was the first Ubuntu version I tried (2nd for Canonical). It was a good experience installing and using Hoary and much better than the current Edgy.
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Amarok 1.4.4 was released today. With 1.4.4 comes basic support for the Rio Karma. Over 100 bugs were fixed in this release. Click here to download.
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Microsoft has released Windows Media Player 11 today. It has a new UI which is better than the older one and has MTV’s Urge integrated. Click here to read FAQs and Click here to get the skins and plugins.
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Another Internet Explorer 7 vulnerability was found today within a weeks of finding another flaw. Secunia rated this one moderately critical. The description of the flaw as per secunia:
A vulnerability has been discovered in Internet Explorer 7, which can be exploited by malicious people to spoof the content of websites.
The problem is that a website can inject content into another site’s window if the target name of the window is known. This can e.g. be exploited by a malicious website to spoof the content of a pop-up window opened on a trusted website.
Secunia has constructed a test, which can be used to check if your browser is affected by this issue:
http://secunia.com/multiple_browsers_window_injection_vulnerability_test/
The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 7.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2.
Update: Betanews reports that this flaw even exists in IE6, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0.
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Posted 30 Oct 2006 — by Arun
Category Time Pass
This is what happens when you go to bed at night and forget to shut down your computer. Do you know where your icons are and what they are doing?
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Posted 27 Oct 2006 — by Arun
Category Time Pass
BeGreen Carbon Offsets is a product/website offered by Green Mountain Energy Company which helps you offset your carbon footprint. Once you sign up and enter the information about the amount of electricity you use, the vehicles you drive, the distance, the amount of natural gas you use etc., It’ll show you the amount of Carbon footprint you are creating or polluting the environment with. Once you figure out the estimated amount of emissions your lifestyle puts into the atmosphere each year, you can become carbon neutral by paying (helping) for projects like renewable energy facilities, tree-planting etc. your purchase goes toward a combination of the following:
Let us keep our environment clean.
ps: I’m in no way related to Green Mountain Energy Company nor did they ask me to write any review. I got the link through downloadsquad. The only reason was to help the environment.
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