Blog posts from 2017

What I like and dislike about Ubuntu 17.10

18 Oct 2017 | Ubuntu

The release of Ubuntu 17.10 marks (yet another) paradigm shift in the development history of this Linux distribution. The home-grown Unity desktop shell is gone; Ubuntu 17.10 offers a Ubuntu-flavored Gnome desktop experience. This article lists my impressions with Ubuntu 17.10. It’s really mostly negative impressions, but some things are better than with Ubuntu 17.04. May it help others make the decision whether to upgrade to 17.10 or not.

Getting Phatch to work on Ubuntu 17.04

19 Jul 2017 | Linux, Ubuntu

Phatch is a fantastic tool to process a large number of photos in the same manner. For example, I use it to shrink images to show on a digital picture frame. Unfortunately it has not been maintained for years, and it will not start on recent versions of Ubuntu. Here’s a workaround.

Running Windows applications on a Samba share

1 Jun 2017 | Linux, Samba, Tips & Tricks, Windows

I have some (virtual) Windows machines running in a network of Linux hosts. I keep some Windows applications (most notably, WSUS Offline Update) on an external hard drive that is connected to a Linux host via USB and shared with the Windows machines via Samba. Despite relaxing the Windows security settings more and more, Windows refused to run the applications on the shared drive until I made a change to the Samba configuration on the Linux host.

Deploying a Discourse forum with Capistrano

7 Jan 2017 | Howto, Linux, Server, Tutorial

[Updated] Here I describe how to automate deployment of Discourse to your own server using Capistrano.