Cold, real cold (again)

Once again a cold front is passing by... Me, I'm a happy camper, no question about that.

Compiz settings thru gconf-editor

There is a nice and easy way to modify the drop shadow effect (actually you can edit just about any Compiz Desktop Effect setting) without the need to install any extra program.

Simply start up gconf-editor and browse to: /apps/compiz/plugins

Here is a little screenshot of the settings and the result on Hercules as of today.

A couple of pictures

Mighty busy this week been has... As Yoda might say... And over it is not yet.

Winter, once again...

After a freaking summer interlude in the middle of winter, things are back to normal.

Currently reading

During the weekend finished Warday, it was sort of a disappointment -waited for years till I get my hands on a copy-, but it gets a little better as it progresses, nevertheless, as post apocalyptic novels go, this is one of the softest and strangest I read so far.
Started right away with Juliet, Naked, which seems like pure Hornby at its best.

The Road, but down South...

This might look like something out of The Road, but, unfortunately it is not.

Ash covered landscape

The Final Frontier got final

I was 10 years old when the first launch, remember that they let us watch it on the school's TV (color TV!) it was great, the beginning of that science fiction turn true decade that were the 80s.

Bye Bye (some) TTF Fonts

Removed some fonts that I'm pretty sure I won't be using much, or never.

The current Ubuntu desktop

Back to Gnome Colors it is...

Epecuén raising

Once a booming small tourist town, located about 500 kms. from Bs. As., in 1985 the whole place flooded in a matter of days; the waters are now receding, and the remains are left in the sun.
More pictures and the story (in Spanish):

La historia del pueblo que volvió a emerger

Winter on, again

Luckily we are starting a week in which, it seems, winter climate will be among us once again, there is still some hope...

Restore to infinity

Either I have way too much stuff, or the Sony Vaio it about to have its final round...

Re-installed Lucid on the antique Sony Vaio yesterday (had to, but that's another story), and today spent, literally, the whole day copying back files onto the little lappie...

Took me about 9 hours to get those files from the USB drive to the box... And we are talking about 250 GB of files...

Rewiring the Desktop

Literally, my desktop table...
Fed up with the slowness of my rat ass piece of crap DLink, specially for making box to box LAN backups, it is back to the Ethernet for me, baby!

A new Lucid beginning

For the Thinkpad T43, at least...

Last night installed Lucid on the new 320 GB HDD.
As usual, went with the Alternate installer, took about 3 hours till CD boot to get the system with all the up to date updates installed.
Regarding those, I thought there will be much more updates to download than the 300 MB or so that were available.
What it took nearly 6 hours was restoring my files from the USB drive to the lappie.

Fade to black

Today switched the mouse cursor from the stock Ubuntu white to black.
That isn't news at all -well, for it is...- except for the fact that there is a bug that doesn't allow you to change it (if you're running Compiz).

You don't only need to edit the file:

/usr/share/icons/default/index.theme

With the name of the cursor shape you want to use, but also be sure that the same name is reflected on the "index.theme" file of the actual theme you are running.

UbuntuNotOne (2)

I've said bye bye to UbuntuOne about a month and a half ago, but it still buggered my boxes once in a while trying to sync to the server (even tho I've have long ago unliked my boxes).
So that was enough... Slowly removing all the UbuntuOne programs from my Lucid Lynx installations.

Hibernate a Sony Vaio PCG-FRV37 on Ubuntu

BTW, this is specific -or better yet, tested- to Lucid Lynx 32 bits...

1- Logout Gnome
2- Swtich to Virtual Terminal
3- Login to the shell
4- Issue the commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

or

sudo service gdm stop

This last one kills the X Window Server.

5- And then, actually put the lappie to sleep:

sudo pm-hibernate

Presto, the beast sleeps, or hibernates... Until you wake it up.
Does this beats shutting it down? Not sure, since you are actually login out from your Gnome session there is not much of a speed gain, nor there is on the time it takes from waking up from hibernation. The only advantage I can think of is that the HDD make a few pulls during the "spin-up from hibernation" than from a full boot.

Winter: good while it was here

Thank you, it was really nice for a while, see you next year.

At what price backups?

Slowly but steadily in the process of migrating all the external HDD backups to encrypted volumes...
It is somehow a PITA, but what a hell, I sleep better at night.

Some annoying problems I've run into, sometimes the encrypted drive refuses to mount properly. Usually this happens because the prior mount did not exit cleanly.

sojourner # ls /dev/mapper/
control  udisks-luks-uuid-50508a07-7d38-4be4-975e-ee1d048c1cd6-uid1000
sojourner # sudo dmsetup ls
udisks-luks-uuid-50508a07-7d38-4be4-975e-ee1d048c1cd6-uid1000 (251, 0)
sojourner # sudo dmsetup remove udisks-luks-uuid-50508a07-7d38-4be4-975e-ee1d048c1cd6-uid1000

Updates dujour

An important one for this Monday morning... Will see how it goes... Testing it on Viking (with its new HDD)

The current Ubuntu desktop

A very nice and softly looking GTK theme called Murrina Chupetin, of course, Metacity is still Clearlooks and Gnome Colors as usual, are the icons.

The current Ubuntu desktop

Nothing much has changed... Still the ole trusty Gnome, Clearlooks & the beloved Gnome Colors icon set.