Though I was tempted to switch to Ubuntu‘s latest release on my “main” computer I decided to give Arch Linux the promotion. Not that there’s anything wrong with “Quantal” aka “Ubuntu 12.10″ – with the exception of the newly introduced shopping lens – but I wanted something different again. I ran Arch Linux some time ago and liked it a lot. It then came to my attention that it was missing one (at least for me) essential feature: package signing. There has been quite some discussion about this matter and I think it was this August when package signing became default for Arch’s package manager. Of course you can argue about the importance but I like to know that packages are as the package maintainer wanted them to be and that nobody messed with them while stored on all the different mirrors. However, I wanted to give it shot.
Category Archives: HOWTO
EncFS & Dropbox for Linux/Android/Windows/MacOSX
Nowadays there are a lot of possibilities of storing documents online – which is quite handy if you need to have stuff available on different devices or share it with others. I think one of the first who managed to make this quite easy and even supported all major OS’s was Dropbox. So I take Dropbox as example but this should work with Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Google Drive as well. You have to put a certain amount of trust in these companies and when it comes to data a little more sensitive it’s advisable to encrypt it before uploading. My first approach was a TrueCrypt container and this of course works very well but when I stumbled upon EncFS I seconded TrueCrypt. The combination of Dropbox and EncFS works on all my OS’s: Linux, Windows, MacOSX and Android – isn’t that great? ![]()
Let me state this right at the beginning: I gathered almost everything in this post from others and I will indicate the original source. I just wanted to put it all together – next time I need it I know where to look!
Debian Squeeze & bluetooth audio
As I just got my hands on a new bluetooth headset – a Sennheiser MM100 – I wanted to make it work with Debian Squeeze (worked like charm with my Android phone out of the box). My notebook Samsung R780 does not come with bluetooth equipped so I use my old Belkin mini bluetooth adapter F8T016 to connect and I guess it should work with any more or less current bluetooth adapter (of course it has to support A2DP).
Conky with Debian Squeeze & Samsung R780
VMware with kernel 2.6.38 [updated for kernel 2.6.39]
Running Debian Squeeze with the latest kernel 2.6.38 from Debian Backports I had some trouble getting VMware Player to work. Once started it complained about not being able to compile the “vmnet” kernel module. I found the solution here and this is how you can make it work:
Debian is back…
Updated Nvidia installation howto on May, 22nd 2012
…on my computer!
What is (in my opinion) the greatest of all operating systems is back: Debian 6.0 aka “squeeze” was released last weekend. Of course as always with new Debian releases – compared to other recently released Linux distributions – the software which comes with squeeze is rather “old”, i.e.: Linux kernel 2.6.32, Gnome 2.30, KDE 4.5, OpenOffice 2.3. That’s the price you have to pay for a very stable operating system. For the first time the default installation media has no “non-free” software on board. This might be tricky for those who depend on non-free firmware to get W-LAN running! (In this case see the Debian documentation here.)
I really love Debian and in fact prefer it over Ubuntu. Though I tend to run the latter as it comes with more recent software.
But now I couldn’t resist and as I was just recovering from a nasty flu I had some spare time… I was running squeeze (with KDE as desktop) on my old Acer laptop for quite a while before it’s stable release and it worked pretty good. I was a bit worried though if all hardware of my new Samsung R780 laptop would work with squeeze – but hey: what the heck, let’s try!
Samsung R780 with Ubuntu 10.10
I wanted to replace my desktop computer by a laptop for quite a while now and as it started to randomly freeze – no matter which OS it ran – I decided the right time has come now. I did some online research and then picked a Samsung R780 Helix (link in German). The bare technical facts:
- Intel Core i5 430M CPU
- 4 GB RAM
- Nvidia GeForce GT M330
- 17,3″ display with 1600×900 resolution
- Blueray drive
- 640 GB harddisk
- integrated webcam
- unfortunately no bluetooth
The R780 is available in several flavors which differ in harddisk space and CPU type. Helix comes with an Intel Core i5 430M and a 640GB harrdisk. So far I don’t regret my choice! It’s very quiet (no noisy fans), good keyboard and a nice display. Of course it comes preinstalled with Windows 7 (64bit). I didn’t remove Windows but I wanted Linux installed as well. (By the way, the hardware seems pretty compatible with current Linux distrubutions.) So, this is how I got along…

