If you’re running Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04 on your MacBook you’ve probably experienced that odd popping sound eminating from the speakers when playing music or video.

I’ve found for my MacBook 2,1 changing the selected device profile in the sound preferences permanently fixed this issue. Now I have crisp, clear surround sound as expected.

Go to System → Prefences → Sound → Hardware (tab)

The Profile selection was defaulted to  ”Analogue Stereo Duplex”. I changed this to “Analog Surround 4.0 Output” and the sound cleared up. And an added bonus: I now have control over the fading between front and rear surround settings.

Change sound settings to "Analog Surround 4.0 Output" to fix popping sound in Ubuntu on MacBook

Update, 22 May, 2010. While the fix below was working for a while, it eventually stopped as well. Then I came across this article at Apple. Evidently, when the battery reports 0%, it is a hardware error and the System Management Controller must be reset. It’s quite simple: Read the rest of this entry »

I just installed Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 on my white MacBook 2,1. Everything is working flawlessly :)

I wanted to write this, though, to share how I got it working, because there are many differing opinions on how to install Ubuntu as the only OS on a Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

AnandTech ran an interesting (and VERY thorough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to highlight my favorite section.

Titled CPU Benchmarks, they test applications running on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu. The amazing thing is the applications running on Ubuntu via Wine performed better than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project written ½ by volunteers and ½ by commercial interests, intended to duplicate the Windows API on Linux, actually outperforms the software it’s intended to mimic. That’s amazing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m really looking forward to this project maturing: Nautilus support for Google Docs.

During his 12 weeks at Google’s Summer of Code this developer managed to integrate Google Doc’s cloud with Nautilus, so all your docs can be browsed and edited on Linux just like normal documents. This is how I imagined cloud computing working, where the document can be accessed both locally and remotely, and all the cloud docs can be easily backed up like any other file on your system.

I’m particularly interested in the fact that all the docs appear as OpenOffice files.

I am excited to see that gPHPEdit is now under active development again. I downoaded the Feb 9, 2009 snapshot and tried compiling it.

At first I was given the error that the following libraries were not installed:

gtk+-2.0
libgnomeui-2.0
gnome-vfs-2.0
libgtkhtml-2.0

So I ran these commands to install them:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev

Then navigate to the source directory and run these commands in your terminal:

cd gphpedit
./configure
make
sudo make install

Here is gPHPEdit 0.9.91 running on Ubuntu 9.04 :)

gPHPEdit 0.9.91 running on Ubuntu 9.04

Recently I re-configured my setup for more convenient dual-booting between Mac OS & Ubuntu Linux. I created a common hfs+ partition that both Ubuntu and Mac OS share, and this is my main storage for my work.

It took a bit of finagling to get Ubuntu Linux writing to the hfs+ drive, so I wanted to share my experience for those who might benefit from it.

Furthermore, I experienced a wierd issue where, while running Ubuntu my computer improperly shut down, and the hfs+ drive was no longer writeable. Below is how I fixed that.

Setup

Mac OS Leopard on hfs+ journaled partition

Ubuntu 9.04 on ext4 partition

Common hfs+ (unjournaled) partition for sharing data

Prepare Ubuntu

I found everything I needed to mount an hfs+ drive already installed on Ubuntu. But write support was not working be default. So I edited my /etc/fstab to include this as the last item, and it mounts the drive with read/write permissions.

/dev/sda3 /mnt/common hfsplus user,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

1. “/dev/sda3″ is the path to the drive’s partition
2. “/mnt/common” is the location I want to mount the drive at
3. “hfsplus” is the partition type
4. “user” allows a normal user (not just root) to mount this drive
5. “auto” means mount automatically when booting
6. “uid” is my user’s id, allowing it access to this mount point
7. “gid” is my user’s group id, allowing that group access to this mount point
8. The two zeros at the end…
   1. zero 1 is the dump option: “should this be backed up?” Zero means “no”
   2. zero 2 is the order in which fsck should check the filesystems. Zero means “don’t check”

One caveat, I had to adjust the permissions on all files that I want read & write access to in both operating systems. Otherwise, when Ubuntu saved a file, OS X only had read permission, and vise-versa.

Here’s the command that recursively sets permissions an all files in the common drive to 777:

sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/common

Fix hfs+ read/write when improperly shut down

Once, after hibernating my computer in Ubuntu, it would not wake up, so I force-restarted. Evidently this caused the common partition to have an improperly-unmounted flag that would not let Ubuntu write to it. After booting into OS X and restarting into Ubuntu, it worked. I guess booting into Mac OS reset that flag…but I’m not entirely sure. But it did fix my read/write access to my hfs+ partition :)

Meld is, by far, the best diff viewer & editor that I have used. Earlier I posted about getting Meld up and running on OSX and overcoming a couple of issues. With the current version of MacPorts (1.7.1) and Meld 1.2, it’s much easier :) Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a great article describing how the French Police saved money with Ubuntu. It starts out by saying

“France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.” “…has saved up to €50 million on licensing and maintenance costs as a result of the migration strategy” “The Gendarmerie migration also demonstrates the significant cost savings that governments can get from adopting open source software. As the global financial downturn continues to put pressure on budgets, governments are going to increasingly look to open source software as a way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direction from Canada and the UK.”

I found it interesting that they state the biggest difference between Ubuntu and Windows, from their point of view, was the icons

“Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

I am also very encouraged that they’re concerned about open standards. I wish more businesses and institutions though this way and I hope the Gendarmerie’s example promulgate open standards.

“[The Gendarmerie] has found that open source software is better at handling open standards.”

Humor works. Humor + Negativity works even better. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will certainly not become viral, I have been studying viral marketing and wanted to share about a small experiment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories (Kindle Edition) in which the author states

It turns out people react to negatives. Several years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Executives Only,” which generated more traffic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are interesting, and people want to know what’s there.

This got my creative juices flowing and I decided to experiment. Continuing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an example of a blogger, Mark Hinkle, who did a satirical article on Ubuntu. Just so happens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by making a negative article of “Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not serious at all, actually it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily written, jotted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog normally receives 200 visitors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 visitors. It had been picked up by a couple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stumbled, it was twittered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather interesting conversations in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of success on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an article that I spent hours on.