I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS for the past year, but have often relied on my old MacBook for doing various things that I haven’t easily figured out how to do in Linux. One of those things is to trim video files non-destructively. This is quite simple to do in QuickTime, although Apple now forces you to save the file with a QuickTime container (.mov) even though there is still only MPEG-4 compression in the file (h....
Just as I started to believe that Ubuntu had matured to become a super-stable and grandma-friendly OS, I got an unexpected black screen on boot of Ubuntu 10.04 on a Dell Latitude D400. After some googling I have found a solution that works: On boot, hit the `e’ button when the grub menu shows up. Then add the following after “quiet splash”: [i915.modeset=1]{style=“font-family: monospace;”} If this works and you get into the system, you can do this procedure to change the grub loader permanently:...
I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use....