February 5th, 2008
In writing my last article about the various search engines I came across a fun site called Ubuntu Popularity Content. This site shows the number of downloads and installs for every package in the Ubuntu repository. It is certainly an interesting look at what people are using and if you are an Ubuntu users I suggest you take a look, maybe you will find a great new package.
January 21st, 2008
As of late I have been having some trouble with HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer). I finally found the solution and decided I would post it here in case anyone else my need it. The symptoms of this problem are simple. When Gnome boots up you get an error stating “failed to initialize HAL”. There are many problems that can cause this error but the one that I keep running into was tricky to find but extremely easy to resolve.
It boils down to a boot order issue where dbus and HAL are scheduled to boot at the same time. The problem with this is that often HAL requires dbus to be up and running. To figure out if this is the specific cause you can take a look at the /etc/rc2.d/ folder. You simply want to make sure HAL’s three digit prefix comes after dbus’s. For example “S12dbus” followed by “S13hal”. If it doesn’t simply execute something like the following command in the terminal. Make sure you change it to match your system.
sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S12hal /etc/rc2.d/S13hal
If you have ran into this problem I hope this will help you get it fixed.
December 20th, 2007
Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba. –via digg.com
This is great news for all the Linux and Mac users out there!