(Intended date of release 2012/02/13. Procrastination…. Finally released today.)

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10(Oneiric Oncelot) I had a unique problem with my machine that was not googleable. All I could see is a symptom where my CPU fans would start full speed and keep blowing for a while. While they were up all my CPUs would be at 100% utilization. On various occasions that this would happen I had to restart the machine as it became unresponsive. Often times this would happen at nights when the machine is not being used.

Recently when I was researching how to manage power settings with LUbuntu(which is harder than it sounds) I found that powernapd was something that Ubuntu running in background to manage power usage of the machine components. This sounds like a reasonable thing to run since Ubuntu now supports Netbooks, Notebooks and Desktops all at the same time. In my case since I am running Ubuntu on a desktop it did not need such strict power management.
I decided to try and turn this daemon off. Now my CPU utilizations reflect the amount of processor power my currently running applications use and there is no fan whirring anymore.

ProTip: Tweak your Ubuntu – Lubuntu is minimalistic so use Ubuntu Gnome to tweak LUbuntu settings.

Recently I was trying to host git repository from an already existing(non-bare) repository. I
was looking for a solution that does not force me to create a bare repository and does not
require me to install apache or some such webserver on my machine.

I found a wonderful tool written by Scott Chacon called grack. grack is a git server on top of rack. Its elegance is in its design. It consists of few hundred lines of a rack middleware(awesome!) and a 6-8 line config file that allows you to host any repository over http. Setting it up on a local
machine was really easy. Even hosting multiple repositories is trivial.

I discovered one quirk when my server was not accessible, was due to binding it specifically to 127.0.0.1.
Avoid this and bind to the hostname instead.

Many thanks to Scott Chacon, Github, Rack and Ruby for keeping it so simple.

Over the past few months I have been using a community version of bash_profile, bash_login, emacs settings and such. It started when Muness shared his bash_vcs(which was pimped command prompt) and I was hooked. I noticed a few projects that were sharing similar shell settings and enhancements. Forking from Toby’s dotfiles I started enhancing my experience on every machine I worked. This not only lead me to have a better understanding how different flavours of Unix work and also helped me automate a lot of my day to day activities.

Allow me to introduce the dotfiles project which comes with all those enhancements – stolen and tweaked from many sources – and with valuable help from Patrick Turley .
Recent additions include bash_boost and what could be called the beginnings of a javavm(inspired by rvm for ruby.)
Now with more brainpower behind dotfiles we hope to add more features fast. Next steps include adding support for zsh.

Give it a try, fork it or point us to more stuff we can steal to improve it for you.

I have faced the same problems with Wireless Networking as mentioned by many on the web.
I tried Hardware Compatibility List for Linux and many links on that list. In an attempt to install custom drivers I would always end up with a network card that would detect wireless but never would communicate over wireless. After going through a number of cards and uninstalling and installing drivers I found one that worked really well without resorting to the ndiswrapper solution(dealing with anything windows just feels unclean). Finally I found a card that worked and also provided native linux drivers.The wireless usb card that worked was – D-Link DWA-125 with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.It also helped that D-Link in fact published a linux driver for their wireless usb card

Last night when struggling to get Firefox to play with Ubuntu and Flash I found this
forum.

The instructions that worked for me are as follows

1. Remove all installations of flash (9, 10.. )
2. Remove all installations of gnash
3. Remove all installations of swfdec
4. (Basically remove everything that conflicts with flash player – some of these things come bundled with Ubuntu)
5. Remove any file in “/usr/lib/firefox/plugins” with the word flash in its name.
eg. libflashplayer.so or in my case alternate-flashplugin.so.

6. Once you have verified that all this has gone (You could use about:plugins url in your firefox to see all the plugins you have along with their associated file types) – reinstall the latest version of flash player from adobe website.

7. You should have Hulu.com working.

Hope this helps someone who is trying to do the same.

“Now when someone asks – Do you have Flash working on Linux – you know what to say”