A few days after the Gutsy install I’ve noticed that a lot of time the system is very slow, almost does not respond to anything. Initially I thought it’s spamassasin which is known to take a lot of processing power while receiving mails but doing a top revealed a new hungry process: trackerd eating 99% of cpu on my laptop. I’ve done a pkill -9 trackerd and regained control of my system....

It also came the font moment. After all linux installs there is such a moments when the fonts are not quite as expected. This was also the case for the Gutsy default terminal font. Actually in this case the solution was simple as it required just to change the system fixed width font from Monospace to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

The install Finally after the painful upgrade I decided to do a fresh install on a different partition. After the bad experience of the upgrade the install was rather simple. After installing everything I had the following results: video – ok after installing nvidia-glx-new using the restricted manager sound – ok but recording still bad wireless – ok suspend, hibernate – no data migration – I linked the new home directory to the home on the other partition and everything was ok Other packages I installed most of the other required base packages for me using automatix2 and apt-get....

Everything started with a perfectly working Feisty install on a Dell D820. Pushed again by the little upgrade daemon I decided to do the Gutsy upgrade especially since I did a Edgy to Feisty upgrade some time ago on my old Dell I8600 and everything worked perfectly. A ruined upgrade I waited until the end of the week, well I had my share of bad upgrades so I did not wanted to risk a work day, and decided to upgrade....

Why? I never thought much about brass until, while repairing my house I took a better look at the old door handles. In time the bad workers painted them layers over layers but I decided to try to restore them to some of their original look. Start: , during: , end: Tools Here are the tools I used: metal brush (manual) metal wire wheel brush for drill a flame transparent varnish patience Steps If there is too much and too old paint, burn it before but don’t burn the brass too much as it will be harder to clean Use the metal brush on the item until the clean metal is exposed all over....

It might seem impossible to the people knowing my mother but she called me today asking how to read a document from an USB stick in Ubuntu. Yes, even my mother is using Ubuntu which I installed a few weeks ago. It was more of a distant hope as I would never have hopped she would really use it. She was always afraid of computers and had taken notes with all the steps, click by click....

It seems that getting an internet connection in the center of Bucharest is a complicated now as ever so the gprs connection to my phone which I pay and almost never used came to mind as an idea. Not really usable for internet but not to remain completely disconnected. So here is a short guide to connect to internet using bluetooth and my T630 phone for a GPRS Vodafone connection....

I was a bit shamed about writing something about windows but then I thought there are so many ugly jobs which are respectable so the job of writing windows programs might fit somewhere too. So this is an article about how to write a small C# application which can calls code from a COM object. As a warning some of the informations here might be considered common knowledge to windows people so please don’t be too judgmental about....

My very old plustek scanner only had windows 9x drivers so I kind of doubt it would still work on windows. On ubutu it was ridiculous easy to use it. I just had to: copy the file ccd548.fw from the scanner installation cd to /usr/share/sane/gt68xx run xsane (i run it as root even if this is not recomended). It takes a bit to warm the lamp but then it works perfectly....

This a delicious way to cook your vegetables in the oven with little effort. Just cut and cook wait. I’ve tried using eggplants, marrows, potatoes, cucumbers but let your inspiration (or your fridge stock) fly. It can be served hot or cold for a summer day. Vegetable stew (photo updated 14-jul-2010) Ro: vinete si dovlecei la cuptor Ingredients 2 green medium size marrows (squash) 2 eggplants 1 green pepper 4 small potatoes 3-4 tomatoes 1/2 onion olive oil 3-4 tbs optional: bay leaves, fresh thyme Preparation Peal the eggplants and cut them in small pieces (choose the shape you like best) Peal the marrows and cut them in small pieces....