Is Microsoft on the ropes right now?  It certainly seems so with the high levels of attacks they’ve been levying on the Linux and Mac market (even though M$ does own most of Mac, I’d call their attacks on Apple merely a charade for the public).

It may seem like they’re clearly trying to take the lead, but everyone in psychology is familiar with the defence mechanism, which alludes to the possibility that Microsoft is about to have a corporate-equivalent of a stroke.

And honestly, if I were Microsoft I’d be sweating it too.  Its getting to the point where Ubuntu Linux is matching OSX in the eye candy factor (though I’d argue its been vastly superior for years now, especially since XGL and Beryl came onto the scene), its much faster than 7 or XP, in many arenas, much more secure than Vista or OSX (“Vista SP2 most secure OS”…yeah…right, apparently they’ve never encountered OpenBSD or the grsecurity Linux kernel, even the NSA likes Linux), and invariably cheaper (who wants to spend money on an OS AND have to pay for support when they can have a free OS that works most of the time and you only have to pay for support when/if you need it, but even then, there’s plenty of documentation around the web about how to do things, so you really don’t even have to pay for support, though the same could be said about Windows, but sometimes there’s that one situation no one has ever tried before).

So it could be very good news for us Linux fans.  With Google’s Chrome OS coming up (albeit its not truly Linux, it does at the very least include the Linux kernel), OSX on the rise, and Windows 7 on shaky grounds (with the MS Word injunction, and all of the anti-trust litigation surmounting M$ right now); it could very well be the start of the decline of Microsoft’s empire.

You know what they say, everything with a beginning, must have an end.

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Actually its a tale of just one. I’d like to take the opportunity to praise UPS (the United Parcel Service) for their end result in an extraneous case.

My friend had me build him a computer, but he lives out of state so I had to send it off.  UPS has good prices in comparison to FedEx and like hell I’m gunna put a desktop computer in the hands of the USPS.  However I know crap happens from time to time, so I packaged the computer in the box the case came in (double walled cardboard and a custom fitting Styrofoam pack), as well as purchased enough insurance to replace the unit should it be necessary.

Well, the worst case scenario ended up happening.  The desktop arrived at my friend’s house with the case trashed and the computer itself, non-functional.  So I had him send it back so I could get a better look at it.  It was indeed broken.

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So I’ve been experiencing issues with Pidgin randomly freezing, locking up, and behaving erratically in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. I looked into the issue and ran into this bug. If you’re unfamiliar, Canonical did some significant changes to libnotify in 9.04 and that bug seemed to tip me off to the problem.

I use the nVidia restricted drivers as well so it could be a problem in that arena, but if you’re suffering from the issue, until it gets fixed, you can just disable the Pidgin libnotify plugin (go to your Plugins menu and uncheck the “Libnotify Popups” plugin). This should fix the issue, I’ll correct myself if it doesn’t.

So I was having some problems with bash wrapping lines back over the current line that it was on.  Come to find out this was due to the colors I used in my PS1 variable.

To fix this, you need to change from a color identifier like

red=’\e[0;31m'

to something like this

red='\[\033[0;31m\]‘

This should fix your problem with the linewrap issues

So the other day I hit suspend to disk in one of my classes when I was getting ready to move from one to another.  I run Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my laptop just for ease of administration and such, my laptop uses the crazy Broadcom bcm43xx wireless chipset.  But after trying to RESTORE the PC, it would not come back online.  So I did a hard reboot, at which point the X server would not come back up.

After investigating farther I noticed the problem was due to a single line in the fstab file under /etc/fstab.  Basically this file is a descriptive table of the layout of your filesystem (hence fstab)  The line of code in question was “errors=remount-ro”.  This was tagged onto my main root filesystem (mounted at /), and basically means that if the system detects an error, to remount the file system as read only.  X11 won’t work under read only mode apparently.

The way to fix this is to run fsck, you can boot into the recovery kernel and run it from there.  This basically replays the journal (if you’re using a journaling file system) and corrects any discrepancies.  I personally also removed the “errors=remount-ro” portion of that line.  I understand that this could lead to data corruption in the future, and you should realize this too if you use that line.  Basically my mounting it as read only, it prevent any further entries into the journal before you can get a chance to run fsck.

Now the permanent fix as I’ve come to find out, has to do with swap space.  From what I understand, in order for suspend to disk to work, you need at lead the amount of RAM you have available in the swap partition.  Most people have double the amount of swap that they do of RAM but I have 2GB of RAM so I only have 1GB of swap.

That should fix the problem.  I haven’t attempted it personally but I do believe this is the problem from the things I’ve been looking at.

Ok so I’m the only contributor right now.  Page is up and coming, hang tight