I should admit - I shamelessly borrowed part of the title for this post from Tyler.
I had exactly same feeling after upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04.

I’ve been meaning to write about this upgrade for almost two months now. Right after Ubuntu 8.04 was released I upgraded two of my laptops from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. I know, I know, never download software on the release date, wait for a couple of months before all major bugs are fixed and it starts working somehow. But anyway…

Read the rest of this entry »

Even if you are not Sampo bank’s customer, but live in Finland, you have most probably heard by now about continuous problems Sampo had with their web-bank system.

When Sampo launched the new system this Easter, they took into use Java-based authentication system. Of course it didn’t work in my Ubuntu 7.10, but after removing Open JDK and installing latest Sun JDK it started functioning again - at least log in worked. This Java solution raised a lot of concerns in internet community.

Read the rest of this entry »

After upgrading Ubuntu to 8.04 I decided it would be a good idea to finally move /home folder to a separate partition. It makes it much easier to make backups and reinstall operating system if all data/configurations are safely stored on their own partition.

Without installing additional hard drive (which would be impractical for laptop user anyway) the only source for extra space was Vista partition. Vista comes preinstalled with most modern laptops, but there’s no need for it to exist taking up to 40Gb of hard drive space, when Ubuntu is the primary OS.

WARNING: Before executing any of the belowmentioned steps, it is highly recommended to make a full backup of your data.
Read the rest of this entry »

I bought myself a new laptop - Lenovo T61 (15.4″ WSXGA+ TFT, Intel GMA X3100 GM965 integrated graphics, 100Gb 7200rpm HDD, 2Gb RAM, Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2GHz CPU, integrated bluetooth, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG). I was really tempted by MacBook Pro, but Lenovo with similar configuration was almost twice as cheap, and still provided everything I need. And after all what is the point of running Linux in Parallels on Mac, when you need to develop for Maemo?

Unfortunately when I bought it in February there was no option to get it without Vista preinstalled, so the first thing I had to do was to install the proper OS. Now Lenovo offers an option to get T-series laptops with SUSE Linux preinstalled.

Ubuntu 7.10 installation worked as a dream - I didn’t have to hack anything at all - everything worked out of the box. Of course I had to configure the system to my needs, but user interface was sufficient for that.

Looking forward to Ubuntu 8.04 release now:

I used Ubuntu 7.04 on my Dell Inspiron 9100 for quite a long time. Unfortunately attempt to upgrade to 7.10 failed miserably - after reboot all I got from Gnome was gray screen (which I managed to go past by explicitly selecting session type at logon), but then “HAL failure” and other problems forced me to just make a clean install (having a separate partition for /home helped a great deal).

Read the rest of this entry »

That finally happened. I’ve completely got rid of Windows on my computers.

The last bastion of Windows was my Nokia work laptop, and now there is Nokia corporate version of Linux installed. I would’ve preferred Ubuntu, but that was not an option.

Migration was relatively painless and that’s yet another proof that Linux can be successfully used on laptops in corporate environments. As a disclaimer I should say that moving to Linux was not a sentimental decision or pledging support for Linux community, but a pure necessity of my present job. Using shell scripts and tools like sort, awk, grep, python, perl and running experiments with web 2.0 stuff locally (even without a network connection) is just so much easier.

The only thing I really miss from Windows is Lifeblog. I really hope that soon there’ll be a way to upload complete Lifeblog database to an internet server and access it via web interface. Let’s see what Ovi brings us when it’s ready.

In the past couple of months I’ve been doing internal trainings, and on pretty much every one of them I was getting questions regarding Symbian platform security. And to be honest, platform security is something that made me loose my sleep a few times over the past couple of years.

But I don’t want this to be yet another post about how bad the PlatSec is, and the reason for that is that I believe it actually is a good thing. Here are some facts.

Read the rest of this entry »