Ubuntu

At least on Apple’s iBook, LXDE/LXDM are not yet recommended. Even though I appreciate lean desktop environments with keyboard shortcuts there are at least these issues:

I fixed a minor problem with the UFW in my Lubuntu installation a few minutes ago.

By relaying DNS queries to local dnsmasq instances, debugging DNS servers in newer Ubuntu releases is no longer strictly file-based.

Even if there are already IPv6-enabled mirrors, that help to maintain an IPv6-only Ubuntu installation, it’s a little tricky to apply a release upgrade.

Using a screen expanding to two monitors was always easy until I installed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

Ubuntu announced to discontinue packaging of Sun/Oracle’s Java for Ubuntu, because Oracle changed the licensing.

Please be careful with upgrades on these packages, since it may drop your Java installation on the system, not only the browser plug-in.

The Huawei E220/E270 stick I got from my mobile provider is working on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx out-of-the-box.

Upgrading all the gear to the newest Ubuntu release also includes Apple’s iBook. It took some time, but was in the end straightforward. Only 2 issues are currently worth mentioning, one about chvt, the other about Gnome Keyring.

In the standard rsyslog setup of Ubuntu a kernel message goes to 3 log files (syslog, messages and kern.log), i.e. running LOG targets in your firewall setup can really hog your /var/log volume.

I decided to simply discard the kernel messages after logging them to kern.log.

A few days ago I managed to connect a new power adapter to the iBook G4 to reanimate it after more than a year of deep freeze.

I soon realized that the installed MacOS is definitely out-of-date including many of the applications (e.g. Safari, Firefox, iPhoto).

Since an upgrade would not only cost money, but the latest MacOS is no longer available for this architecture, I downloaded the unofficial Ubuntu PPC release.