Lucid Tips

Amarok is an excellent music player that uses some core KDE components (like KDElibs) and can be installed independent of KDE on Ubuntu. One issue with this however is that it does not read the system wide proxy settings from GNOME.  The proxy settings under “Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Configure engine” only work for Streaming and hence if you are behind the firewall you cannot access the lyrics service or fetch cover art from the internet. This is easy to fix.

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Virtualization allows running of multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time. This can be very handy if you are doing software development and need to test your application on multiple platforms or are doing a lot of R&D and get tired of reloading the operating system and software. Virtualization is also helpful if you need to run Linux and Windows (or different flavor/version of Linux) at the same time and dual boot just does not cut it. VMWare Server from VMWare is great virtualization software and is provided as freeware. It allows you to create snapshot of the state of any particular virtual machine and revert to it easily.

Update 05/30/2009: Also see VirtualBox – virtualization alternative to VMWare

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Default installation of Ubuntu and XUbuntu do not send the hostname to the DHCP server and this prevents other machines on the network from looking up your machine by using the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). This is easy to fix with a few tweaks to the DHCP configuration file.

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Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) was officially released on Oct-31. Since I had tested Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on Compaq Evo N610c I was eager to give Ubuntu 8.10 a spin on the same laptop. I did a fresh install and the installation is very smooth. A seven step wizard guides you through the install process and you are up and running very quick on Evo N610c.

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