Ubuntu’s Karmic was installed as an alpha on a i386 core solo and upgraded to keep up to date. The AMD 64 version was installed from the release ISO on a USB stick to an AMD Athalon dual core. Two regressions have been noted. One is that the screen blanks despite screensaver and power settings. The other is that autofs mounts file systems read only.
The work around for the screen blanking is to just move the mouse or hit the shift key to bring the display back. UPDATE: one suggested reason for this problem is a discrepancy between the display screen being viewed and the one the gconf settings apply to. The suggested solution is to add a stanza to /etc/X11/xorg.conf: [Section “ServerFlags” -|- Option “blank time” “0” -|- Option “standby time” “0” -|- Option “suspend time” “0” -|- Option “off time” “0” -|- EndSection]
The autofs problem means using nautilus to open network places, windows network, workgroup, and down to the share. Another approach might be to mount the share directly with mount.cifs. That could keep local paths straight with a few adjustments.
UPDATE: for one user on a machine, you can add the uid and gid options to the auto.master line so it looks like, for instance, [/lan program:/etc/auto.smb -gid=1000,uid=1000] – note that the program specification has also been added although it looks like it isn’t needed. What the gid and uid options do is to cause autofs to mount shares so the mount points belong to that user and group. The owner has rw permissions so can write to the shares. group and other do not have write permissions.
The ubuntu-restricted-extras takes care of a lot of the codecs and such things but medibuntu is still useful in that it simplifies the install of google earth and some other packages.
Handbrake is having problems with a display library update so it is on hold for a while. That means using VLC or avidemux for transcoding video files. Avidemux is suffering audio problems. Transcoding from mpeg2 to mp4 has not gone well so far. Maybe the medibuntu codes will help.
Wine seems to do a good job with DeScribe. That allows pulling some very old documents out of mothballs.
It’s always something …
Post a Comment