Ubuntu 18.04 marked the transition to a new, more granular, packaging of the NVIDIA drivers, which, unfortunately, combined with a change in logind, and with the previous migration from Lightdm to Gdm3, caused (Intel+NVIDIA) hybrid laptops to stop working the way they used to in Ubuntu 16.xx and older. The following are the main issues experienced by […]
Here’s a short list of the new features concerning hybrid graphics in Ubuntu 14.04: External displays connected to the NVIDIA GPU can now be used through the “nvidia-settings” panel. We used to disable them but this is no longer the case (also there’s a fix pending for LP: #1296020, in case your BIOS provides a […]
In the light of the (relatively) recent heated technical discussions on display servers and init systems, I thought I would weigh in on how to handle this kind of discussions which, honestly, I find kind of annoying (at least their “heated” side). I do not represent my employer in any way and I base the […]
In this Ubuntu release cycle I worked, among other things, on improving user experience with hybrid systems and proprietary graphics drivers. The aim was to make it easier to enable the discrete card when in need of better performance i.e. when the integrated card wouldn’t be enough. In 13.10 I focused mainly on enablement, making […]
Apparently Android >= 4.1.2 breaks tethering in some cases. Basically you can connect to your phone but you will get no data whatsoever. This may be fair (at least from Google’s point of view) if your mobile phone operator doesn’t allow tethering and Google wants to respect that. If, like me, you’re using a virtual […]
I’ve been very busy with life and work in general and I haven’t blogged for a few months now. I finally get the chance to talk about something I worked on in my spare time. I use Cryptkeeper to decrypt and mount some encrypted directories that I have in my Ubuntu One space but I […]
On 2 January my father passed away at 63, after a little more than a year fighting (a rather aggressive type of) lung cancer. I won’t go into the details of how it went but let it suffice to say that pain and tears have been our bread and butter. A little bit of history […]
Some time ago I had problems using ftp when uploading packages to upload.ubuntu.com (which stalled at about 13% for 100Mb uploads). Somehow sftp seems not to be affected by the problem. Here’s the relevant snippet to use in your ~/.dput.conf: [ubuntu] fqdn = upload.ubuntu.com method = sftp incoming = ubuntu login = <YOURUSERNAME> allow_unsigned_uploads = […]
Premise I use Hamster for time tracking at work and the lack of an applet which works with Unity’s panel is my main obstacle to the adoption of Unity (which I love BTW). For this reason I hacked on the applet’s code in my (very limited) spare time at weekends and I managed to get […]
I’m a satisfied owner of a Nexus One (loving Android Froyo 2.2) and today I decided to try a (volume based) 3G plan by CoopVoce. There are 2 options available: either buy a 3G usb key or simply use 3G directly from your phone. In the former case (which I wasn’t interested in) the usb […]