dev.

The hardware keys for adjusting brightness on a Samsung NC10 aren’t working in an out-of-the-box Kubuntu 10.04. The brightness slider in the Power Management tray application isn’t working as designed as well.

Fortunately, you can set the display brightness using the hardware keys in GRUB, the bootloader that let’s you choose what OS and/or Kernel you want to start.

Settings are lost on reboot, and you still can’t change the brightness at runtime, but it’s better than nothing.

When dealing with foreign names, it is a matter of both correctness and courtesy to use the right spelling. But quite often it is also a problem of “how do I enter this darn character”.

Luckily, there is abcTajpu, a Firefox extension that allows you to select foreign characters, umlauts, … quite easily.

Free, no ads – really worth a try

Installing Ubuntu on a netbook is trivial. Installing Ubuntu/Kubuntu with full disk encryption is absolutely easy. Unfortunately, installing it on a netbook with full disk encryption is not (at least not without a CD-ROM drive).

First of all, the desktop Ubuntu and Kubuntu install images don’t support full disk encryption. So get the Alternate ISO from here (Kubuntu users this way, please). Then create a bootable USB drive using UNetbootin.

Ready? Then boot your netbook from the USB drive, and proceed with the installation using this guide. You will be able to select your country, keyboard and configure your network. Then the installation will fail, because the installer won’t find a CD-ROM drive. Yuck.

Okay, if there is no CD-ROM drive we just have to mount the installer ISO. For this we copy the alternate installer ISO to a second USB stick, plug it into the netbook and give the system a few seconds to recognize it. Then we use alt+F2 to switch to a command line and hit so we can enter commands. First, we should make sure that both USB drives are there:

ls -la /dev/sd*

should return something like this:

/dev/sda
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc

/dev/sda is your hard disk, /dev/sdb is the USB drive you booted from, and /dev/sdc is the second USB drive containing the installer ISO file (unless you have a second hard drive). Now you can mount the second USB drive to /mnt and the ISO image to /cdrom:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /mnt
mount /mnt/ubuntu-10.04-alternate-i386.iso /cdrom/
exit

Next, hit alt+f1 to return to the install menu and select “Detect CD-ROM”. The installation will proceed as described in the blog post above.

Have fun with Ubuntu 10.04!

It’s pretty convenient to list and kill processes using ps and kill / pkill on *nix. Actually, you can do that on a Windows command line as well:

• tasklist: shows a list of all running processes
• taskkill: kills processes

Among other options, processes can be killed by their process ID (taskkill /PID 4711) and by the name of their executable (taskkill /IM firefox.exe).
So, if you have perl scripts running wild, just execute taskkill perl.exe to kill all of them down with a single command.

More lesser known Windows commands are described in this PDF.

Some tools just keep amazing me. They are flexible, stable, small – basically, they just work. One of these tools is 7-Zip.
It does a lot more than just creating 7zip archives: it is able to create and open almost any package type I’ve run across so far. And it even reads .iso image files.
Thanks a lot for this marvelous tool – it’s a joy to use and a definitive must-have!