20111023 Distro/desktop (s)hopping, part 2: XFCE

So since my Ubuntu installation was behaving idiotically I decided to stop delaying the unavoidable, and made a fresh install of Arch Linux on an spare disk. I completed the installation of the basic system in a couple of hours, but I could have finished way earlier if the neighbours didn’t create so much interference [...]

20111020 Distro/desktop (s)hopping, part 1: KDE

One year after, and I’m still running Ubuntu 10.10. I have tested Unity and GNOME 3 both on Virtual Boxes and on real computers and I disliked them both–they convert perfectly capable machines into piles of obsolete hardware. It’s a shame, but it’s their decision. Thankfully, since it’s Linux, we have many choices, and so [...]

20110708 Unicode emoticons with GNOME’s Character Map

GNOME’s Character Map, also known as Gucharmap, comes by default with Ubuntu and any other distribution that uses GNOME. And dull and functional as it is, it can also be the source of much enjoyment! The trick is easy: just go browsing around the Unicode blocks until you find something you fancy, and double click [...]

20110612 Honeycomb, MTP and Linux

TL;DR If you want to transfer files between your computer and your tablet, get aafm, an application I’ve written to work around MTP issues with Linux. Honeycomb ends with the tradition of allowing users to mount the phone’s SD card as an USB mass storage device, and replaces that with MTP. Or, in other words, [...]

20110329 Updating ‘geometry’ in TexLive + Ubuntu

I wanted to use \newgeometry to alter the layout of a document in the middle of it, but I was getting the dreaded Undefined control sequence error, which showed that the version of the geometry package installed with Ubuntu was too old. Thanks to this thread at Ubuntu forums I learned how to install LaTeX [...]