When ltsp-update-image stops working

Today I have a cautionary tale to tell of LTSP machines and Synaptic’s automatic package management features. The other day I updated the packages on my LTSP server. I did it the way I always do: update the server itself, then enter the chroot environment for the client image and update the packages there. During [...]

November 24, 2011   Tags: computing, linux/ubuntu  No Comments

Disable printing in rxvt and urxvt

For a while now, I’ve been using urxvt as my terminal of choice in Linux – it’s small, light and fast, as all terminals should be, but still has some decent features. However, I won’t take that discussion any further – the rest of the internet should provide you with plenty of reading material on [...]

May 26, 2011   Tags: computing, linux/ubuntu  3 Comments

Debugging in Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

The latest release of Ubuntu (10.10/Maverick Meerkat) has clamped down on some of the more esoteric security loopholes in the OS. One of these prevents debuggers from attaching to processes, the idea being that users can’t use a debugger to sniff out interesting data from running programs unless they started them explicitly in debug mode. [...]

November 7, 2010   Tags: computing, linux/ubuntu  No Comments

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   Tags: computing, linux/ubuntu  3 Comments

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   Tags: computing, linux/ubuntu  2 Comments