Disappointed with the usability of the new Unity interface in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix edition (my screen is not wide enough) I’ve recently decided to switch my Linux netbook OS. My distro of choice was MeeGo, but it had some major issues with my Wi-Fi setup, so unfortunately I had to let it go. I went for Jolicloud (project by Netvibes’ founder).

A while ago I conducted a wide-scale login change for most of my Internet services. Some of them, however, were reluctant to allow effortless username change. This applies in particular to Last.fm.

My driver CD for the USB-Serial converter has gone AWOL, so I had to look for the appropriate file.

Straight to the matter - yes, it’s possible. In fact I’ve been happily using a Debian system on my US Robotics USR9108 for more than a month. Or at least sort of Debian, but I will explain this later.

I had to debug my USRobotics router recently (a good old USR9108) as it ceased to respond completely to any network traffic. The CFE was working fine (192.168.1.1 could be pinged), so I thought a tftp firmware flash would do the trick, but to no avail (I got timeouts all the time). Accessing the serial console seemed to be the only way left, so I had to practise some PCB soldering the hard way.

This time in one of my scripts I had to create a replicated filesystem-like structure (whole directory tree with selected files) using symbolic links. One of the problems with managing this kind of structure was maintaining an appropriate resolution for all the symlinks throughout the whole update process of the replicated tree, which occurred occasionally. Preferably atomic rename would do the trick. And as Linux ‘mv’ is nothing more than a nice wrapper around rename call, doing this right should not have been hard at all.

Lately I’ve experienced some issues with the gameserver I was looking after. The problem with administering something without full privileges and some absurd chain of command is if something goes wrong, you have to be really flexible to fix it. Once again problems - this time the ntpd went wild. Actual time was shifted by more than 2 hours and there seemed to be no way to rectify the issue without root intervention - which was not possible at all in this case.

First of all, I have to admit, this one was a bit tough. I’ve spent a couple of painful hours trying to solve it, but let’s get to the matter. My Excel installation behaved strangely lately (a lot of crashes - even when applying bold formatting to cell (sic!)). I’ve just bought a new LCD (yeah, first-in-a-lifetime DualView experience - great!), so it was a good time for a system reinstallation. However, though no more crashes occurred, a new problem arose - I couldn’t use the good old Ctrl+… shortcuts for copying/pasting and other things.