Lucid Tips

I run Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on Compaq NC6000 and one of the features I was missing was Bluetooth. I was hence limited to using USB cable to sync my phone with my laptop using BitPim (see post on Lifehacker). There are many Bluetooth adapters available but I wanted something that was small and discreet that I could keep plugged in all the time and not have to worry about it breaking when I carry the laptop around.

Today I got myself IOGEAR Bluetooth 2.0 USB Micro Adapter. On Ubuntu Jaunty it works without any drivers. All you need to do is plug it in and the Bluetooth Manager indicator shows up. I was able to connect my phone in less than a minute. What I like about this device is that it is truly micro and does not block the other USB port on NC6000.

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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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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I recently decided to rebuild my trusted little Compaq Armada M300 laptop and thought might give Ubuntu another try. Since the laptop is only 500 Mhz with 128 MB RAM XUbuntu is a better candidate as compared to Ubuntu. My earlier attempt of installing XUbuntu had not been very successful but this time I managed to get things working

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