Disabling GDM in Ubuntu
There are various reasons for installing a full Ubuntu desktop, but wanting to run the system in text-only mode by default. Perhaps your machine is a server, and you want as much RAM available as possible for its server activities. Maybe it’s an LTSP server, which needs all the nice GUI stuff for its clients, [...]
May 16, 2010
Posted in: Linux/Ubuntu 
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A wireless, headless Linux box
If you’re using wireless networking in Ubuntu (or, presumably, most flavours of Linux), you may have noticed that your network doesn’t connect until you’ve logged in and the NetworkManager’s applet has done its thing. This doesn’t happen for wired networks, where you get a connection as soon as the machine has booted. This is all [...]
March 11, 2010
Posted in: Linux/Ubuntu No Comments
DVDs that won’t play in Linux, and how to make them behave
Playing DVDs in Linux is generally a pretty painless process. The libdvdcss library does a sterling job of allowing us to watch our DVDs on legitimate hardware using the operating system of our choice, legal machinations notwithstanding. It also manages to circumvent the region encoding of the DVD (an abitrary and legally dubious restriction), allowing [...]
January 8, 2010
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Getting your numpad working again
Recently, I discovered that the number pad wasn’t working on my keyboard. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get any of the keys to work – the Num Lock key changed nothing. Having freaked out for a while (had I poured a pint of water into the number pad without noticing?), I started searching [...]
December 29, 2009
Posted in: Linux/Ubuntu No Comments
