Peter’s Soapbox

My Thoughts on Yahoo! Search as Default for Ubuntu’s Firefox

Last month Canonical announced that they would switch the default search provider from Google to Yahoo! in the Firefox browser that ships with Ubuntu as of version 10.04. Continue reading My Thoughts on Yahoo! Search as Default for Ubuntu’s Firefox…

Quickly Determine What Version of Ubuntu You Have

If you have several machines running Ubuntu, or several versions installed on the same machine, you may, like me, sometimes forget what version you have are running presently. A quick and easy way to do this is with the following command:

lsb_release -a

An example of the output on my system is as follows:

peter@peeeter-karmic:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 9.10
Release:        9.10
Codename:       karmic

It’s Time To Be Lucid

Yesterday, while fiddling with my eeePC and attempting to install Crunchbang on an SD card, I accidentally nuked my GRUB config. Note to self: GRUB and GRUB2 = Oil and water. I started to look at the process of repairing the dreaded GRUB error 21, and then decided that this was a good opportunity to just try Lucid Lynx alpha 1. After all, I have a separate /home partition and my machine was already not booting, so what did I have to lose? Continue reading It’s Time To Be Lucid…

Book Review: I’m on Facebook – Now What???

I just read I’m on Facebook–Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook. While the majority of this 100 page book was review for me, I would recommend it to anyone who is brand new to Facebook or social networking in general.

Continue reading Book Review: I’m on Facebook – Now What???…

Nokia e71 – Phone Startup Failed. Contact Retailer.

That’s what my Nokia said to me today. “Phone startup failed. Contact Retailer.” Swell. I tried several suggestions that I found on the Internet, mostly “reset the phone,” (which I could not do, since I couldn’t even boot it) and “press 3, #, and the green button while powering it on” (no effect) or “press 3, *, and the green button (SEND/ANSWER) while powering it on (also no effect). I also tried booting it with and without the SIM card (no change).

Finally, I removed not only the SIM card but also the memory card, and powered it back on normally. It gave me the brand new startup configuration screen, and the phone’s alive again. Reinserting the memory card makes the phone not start up, and removing it allows it to start normally. So… bad memory card? I guess so. I’ll try formatting it again and seeing if that helps. For now, I need to remove the memory card in order for my phone to start up. Annoying, but I can work around it.