movingtoubuntu - a technicalbloke blog

So, after my pretty middling experience with Avant Window Navigator I went hunting to find a decent dock / launcher, something in the vein of MacOSX or Rocket Dock and boy did I come up trumps!

Cairo Dock, by almost any measure, mows down the competition like some kind of psychopathic light gardener, in fact, it's way too much by default! Thankfully, as evidenced by the inset graphic above, you can prune the screen pyrotechnics back as you see fit...

A life without Youtube is no life at all in the modern world but that's how browsers for all operating systems come out of the box, like crumpets without butter, plain and stodgy. You might think it's a simple apt-get away, that you can just type 'flash' into Synaptic and bosh bosh bosh, but, although that works fine for pretty much everything else, in this case you should tread lightly...

Although in the future this method will undoubtedly work fine, right now (8.04 - September 2008) the web is littered with complaints about the 8.04 repo version and it seems many people are getting stuck during the manual install too. Indeed I was numbered among their ranks owing to the ocean of bad advice about this on the worlds linux forums. Thankfully somebody known as Privacy Girl came to my rescue...

It's a highly contentious topic but I think Ubuntu looks pretty damn nice right out the box. It's certainly far nicer than Microsoft Vista, an operating system that appears to have drawn it's aesthetic inspirations from areas as diverse as plasticky mid-80s HiFi systems and weekend kebab vomit.

Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is highly customisable so you can do anything from making light and tasteful display tweaks to creating a gaudy, spinning, balls-to-the-wall 3d blingfest on your desktop. My tendency is toward the former so here's how to do a few a few basic and (in the right hands) moderately subtle things...

So I was a little down-spirited today when I googled for my favorite FTP program FileZilla and read a few posts lamenting the lack of FileZilla for Linux. I had assumed, like many, because it is a prominent FOSS application on SourceForge that it probably started on Linux and got ported to Windows. Sadly not, there's never been a Linux version.

Okay so this turned out to be a little hairy, but it's a one off kinda thing that might make your daily working environment significantly nicer!

You may not have this issue yourself but excessive fan noise does seem to be a common complaint on the linux forums owing to many distributions just opting to run all the system's fans at full speed all the time. Of course this situation isn't unique to linux...

Being security conscious I entered quite a hefty password during setup. Now I'm coming to realise that, during the immediate post install setup stage I'm having to type it quite a lot! Solution, a far shorter password. Either regularly rotated or set back to a more secure one when things have settled down a bit.

As I had half expected my £6 TP-Link USB WiFi stick didn't work out the box although the trusty old ethernet card, and indeed every other device I have, detected and installed correctly. Ethernet is a beautiful standard and I'll fight anyone who says it isn't! ;-) Naurally the first thing one thinks to try in this situation is browsing to the manufacturers website to see if they have a linux driver...

After many years I had finally gotten quite comfy with Windows XP. It took Microsoft and the worlds software vendors a very long time to get it right and make the platform relatively stable and securable but they did, and a year or two ago things became good. Then of course it all went horribly wrong again...