Ubuntu is, out of the box, pretty good at handling mobile Internet connections via bluetooth from various mobile devices. It even supports the iPhone to some extent.

I’ve been using Ubuntu’s built in functions to access the Internet from my netbook via my iPhone for quite a while now, but I have never been completely satisfied with the reliability, when connecting/disconnecting to the iPhone.

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In this howto, I will take you through a step-by-step guide, on how to set up your own calendar sharing/synchronizing service on a computer running either Debian or Ubuntu.

This is especially useful, if you are using more than just a single computer or mobile device in your everyday life, and want to have all your calendars in perfect sync.

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I recently tried installing the latest version of Ubuntu on my Via EPIA 10000 M board, to use it as a Media Center. But I experienced some strange behavior.

After about 30 to 60 minutes of use, my system completely locked up.
All I could do to get the system back up, was perform a hard reboot.

This happened regardless of what I was doing. Even if the system was just sitting idle for a longer period of time.
I found that I could provoke the lockup to happen, if I played some high-resolution video.

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I’ve always felt frustrated when using the ‘dd’ program to clone harddisks. It does it’s job beautifully and I’ve come to use it somewhat regularly at work lately, but it’s a pain to have to sit around waiting for it to finish. You simply have no clue how long it’s going to take.

If you’ve ever used ‘dd’ before, you properly know that it produces absolutely no output at all while running. Just like the ‘mv’ and ‘cp’ programs.

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I recently installed the latest version of Ubuntu. 8.04 Hardy at the time of writing.

My computer had the previous “Gusty” release installed, so I merely tried to upgrade using the package manager. This resulted in a somewhat crippled configuration, where some parts of my system was not acting as it should. I had no longer any support for joining wireless networks, and my bluetooth connections were also acting strangely. It seemed like a problem with some of the chipset drivers, so I decided to do a clean install of Hardy.

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I just recently started using the new version of the Pidgin instant-messenger client, which recently changed it’s rather popular name from GAIM, due to some legal problems the GAIM team had been having with AOL.

I downloaded the latest source files (at the time of writing the latest version was 2.0.1) from pidgin.im and got it extracted, compiled and installed on my just recently setup Debian 4.0 desktop system.

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Here’s a way of altering, or completely disabling, a feature in Debian, causing the console-monitor to black out after 15 minutes with no user inputs.

This is an old feature meant to prevent an image from being frozen solid into CRT monitors, leaving it somewhat obsolete to people using TFT monitors.

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There are certain things I always forget.

This is one of the things that has kept me starring at a blank UNIX terminal, a few times to many. So I decided to finally document the solution I always end up searching for.

Mounting a Samba share on a Linux/UNIX system is pretty easy, but you might end up not having the right permission on the local folder where you are mounting the remote share, even though you successfully authenticate with the remote Samba username and password.

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I just found this wonderful word of advice, on a subject that has been bugging me for quite some time now, regarding the system disc on my Debian server.

Write FSCKFIX=yes in /etc/default/rcS. You will not face the fsck problem from the next reboot onwards. However, if the disk is corrupted very badly, your presence may be required. I had done some kernel tweaks also for that. I will write about in subsequent tips.