At the end of last week I upgraded my server from Ubuntu Intrepid to Jaunty (and have since gone all the way up to Lucid, a process that was not as simple as I would have liked). As far as I could tell, everything had gone smoothly, but my blog was unavailable (which I discovered very quickly thanks to the automated Pingdom emails). My blog runs on php-fastcgi b...

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Gwibber is a native desktop Twitter client for Ubuntu. It will post updates to and receive updates from Twitter as well as a host of...

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I recently broke the graphics drivers on my Windows Vista installation, so re-partitioned and now run Ubuntu full-time at home. On Windows I use FeedDemon as my full-time aggregator. It has a degree of speed and polish unmatched by any other web or desktop aggregator. This means that all my feeds are automat...

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 If you’ve got a raw Ubuntu box it probably came with gij, the GNU Java runtime interpreter. If you’ve installed Sun’s JDK using sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk then you’ll now have Sun’s runtime but gi...

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Some of the shortcut keys for Firefox on Ubuntu are different to those on Windows. The most pertinent one for me is that the <backspace> key as a shortcut for clicking the “Back” button has been disabled. This is easily fixed in about:config by changing the value of browser.backspace_action to 0. The most annoying however is the one which appears to have no fix, and fo...

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Deskbar is a Gnome widget you can embed in a panel and can be used for opening applications, opening items from your browser history, doing web searches and all sorts. It’s not as good as Quicksilver but better than Launchy. It fires when you hit a key combo (mine is CTRL+SPACE) and loo...

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I have a new PC, and both my bluetooth dongle and mp3 player no longer work; some problem or other with the USB ports. So I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu. I can no longer recover from standby or hibernate mode without a hard reset (possibly because I’m using the proprietary fglrx drivers for my ATI card rather than the free radeon ones) but that’s a small price to pay. Skimming through

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