danellis.co.uk

I have previously ordered Dell PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, namely the Dell Inspiron 530n. These PCs have been excellent for friends and family. Unfortunately I can no longer find the Ubuntu desktops on the Dell UK website. So I asked a Dell representative where I could find one? This was our conversation:-

I was looking to enable password-less login on Ubuntu Karmic for my children, so that they could just click their face from the username list to login. I eventually found how to do this on a very old thread on the Ubuntu forums.

I tend to use the proprietary Nvidia linux driver. But recently I thought I would see if I could get along with the free nv driver. My biggest issue was the low colour depth of the LCD on my laptop. This turns out to be due to the LCD screen being limited to 6bit per pixel rather than the expected 8bit per pixel. The answer is to enable dithering, which the proprietary driver does automatically.

If you have accidentally moved everything around and you want to restore your panels back to their defaults, copy and paste the following in to the run dialog (Alt+F2):

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel && pkill gnome-panel

I have tested this on Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.10. (This does not work on the latest version of Ubuntu, see the updated section below).

The BBC enables you to listen to many shows for the previous week by steaming over the net. Which is excellent, (although it is a shame that they only support proprietary audio streams but never mind that), what is really annoying is the online web page does not let you rewind a show and you can only skip forward by 5 or 15 minutes. The Audio FAQ states "Due to copyright restrictions we are unable to provide rewind functionality on shows that contain music."