A number of security vulnerabilities have been patched in the Ubuntu kernels. Several of the patches fixed situations where a malicious user could cause a kernel panic. I’ve run the update on a few systems without any issues so I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t upgraded yet to do so. More details on the specifics of the fixes can be found in USN-558-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities.

If one were to rank computer issues subject to intense debate, how to partition a hard disk would certainly be high on the list. I’ve always tried to give a lot of thought to the partitioning scheme I’ve used for servers. In those cases I’m often trying to come up with something that will be a standard for some period of time. With desktops the issue is not so important because rarely will a mistake be a problem. So here are some schemes that have appealed to me recently.

Sometimes you just want to take a break and distract yourself a bit. Here are some games and other amusements I've come across that I would suggest people try if their looking for some light entertainment on their Ubuntu system. Of course, people's tastes vary quite a bit but at least this is a place to start. But some people might find some of these games may take more time then they would like so install with caution.

I’ve been reading good things about the newest versions of NetBeans as an IDE for Ruby on Rails development. I decided to try it out and see if it worked well for me. the current NetBeans packages in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) are version 5.5. So to try out the new version I had to download it and install it manually.

I try to keep Firefox as light as possible and so I try and choose my add-ons carefully. Of course it helps that certain extensions have gotten better over time such that they obsolete other extensions. So here is my current list of essential extensions for Firefox.

I have very little doubt that my biggest disappointment and frustration with Ubuntu 7.10 is that pidgin (which was gaim in prior releases) still does not have SILC support built in. I think the frustration is just that th fix is so trivial and has been reported for so long. Still I suppose it’s not considered a big enough priority to warrant anyone’s time though, as noted below, it seems like the Ubuntu folks deliberately pulled functional SILC support from the Debian pidgin package. However, since this release will not ship with functional SILC support in pidgin here is the procedure I used to get SILC working in pidgin under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

Following the upgrade of my desktop computer from Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) I did some work to clean up the system and configure it properly. My efforts focused on configuration files which were overwritten during the upgrade. I also wanted to reduce the large amount of disk space consumed in the upgrade by removing old and unnecessary packages and package archives. I concluded with improving the multimedia capabilities (playing dvd’s and video files) of the system.

I figured I would try and beat the rush and upgrade my desktop computer to Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) tonight. Tomorrow and in the near future the servers hosting the Ubuntu package repositories are likely to be slow. I also feel that I needed to get some practice in tonight in order to assist people I know with the upgrade. In the past I have always performed version upgrades through the shell use the apt-get commands. I wanted to try in this release to see how the graphical upgrade utilities were working. As a user who is frequently trying new things and changing the system I wasn’t optimistic.

A number of people have complained that the current (Ubuntu 7.04) startup and shutdown screens lack the information that they had in earlier releases. Enabling the display of startup and shutdown messages is fairly simple and can be useful in diagnosing system problems. Here’s how to do it.

An enduring legacy of UNIX is the paradigm of partitioning a disk into several partitions for various purposes. While this might still be appropriate in certain scenarios I think it would be wise for modern GNU/Linux operating systems, especially when used on a desktop, to move toward a single physical partition model. The default for Ubuntu when not using LVM is to create 2 partitions: a root partition and a swap partition. I think the default should be 1 partition for root and that swap should be handled by a file on the root partition instead of on a dedicated partition.