If you have noticed a drastic slowdown in your DSL internet connection after you upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) then it might not be that your ISP is entirely to blame. It could be settings on your PC that is slowing things down. We had a problem in our office where Ubuntu PCs were getting only around 80Kbps as opposed to 2Mbps from Windows machines. After troubleshooting and playing with some configuration parameters we got the Ubuntu Machines up to the same level as the Windows PCs
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We run apt-cacher to save bandwidth in our intranet. All Ubuntu systems in our office uses the apt-cacher server to update and upgrade. Recently we started getting the hash sum mismatch and size mismatch errors. After some dabbling with the settings and the files we figured out a simple solution for this problem.
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If you do a google search on this topic you will come across different posts that says how windows does not allow booting of a logical partition and why windows should be installed on a primary partition. The fact of the matter is that windows allows itself to be installed on logical partitions but it will want a primary windows partition to boot up. Recently we faced a situation where we had to make a windows installed on a logical partition boot up on its own.
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One of our customers recently brought an Acer Aspire 3002NLC Laptop to install Ubuntu and to configure the laptop as a Samba server for his home networking. There was one more thing that he wanted to us to configure - that was internet through the Reliance Datacard. The card provided was ZTE MC315. Installing Ubuntu and configuring the rest of the applications were easy but the reliance datacard installation took some time. But once we figured it out, the steps involved were very simple.
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While installing Ubuntu on Laptops, one common problem that we have identified is that the mouse pointer movement using the touchpad is very slow with the default settings. We were hoping that this would be fixed in Ubuntu Hardy Heron but it still is not. Ubuntu allows for the configuration of the acceleration and sensitivity using the System > Preferences > Mouse menu but that too might not give the desired results always. Here is a sure shot way of speeding up your touchpad in Ubuntu.
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We had an opportunity recently to provide support over the phone for one of our customers for installing Ubuntu and configuring Airtel broadband on a desktop PC. The Airtel broadband was connected through a Beetel 220BX ADSL modem but the instructions should work for most broadband connections where the device is a modem router.
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When you have more than one system with Ubuntu installed, and you have to install same or similar set of packages on all your PCs, you can save on a lot of bandwidth if you had some ways of sharing the downloaded packages and updates. There is an easy way to do this in Ubuntu. This is done using apt-cacher a proxy server for your package repositories. It is very easy to set up and configure apt-cacher on a PC with Ubuntu inside your LAN.
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Recently we came across a virus in one of our customers computers. The system was brought in with the complaint that it was running very slow and internet access was too slow to be of any use. We scanned the system with AVG and as was expected found a slew of viruses which AVG removed successfully after a complete scan. All but one - a file named startdrv.exe located at C:\Windows\Temp\startdrv.exe. AVG could not delete the file, neither could we delete it manually from Windows.
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Ubuntu 6.10 had complete multimedia support including mp3, video cds, dvds. This was taken out in 7.10 because of license restrictions on the decoders and their incompatibility with the GNU GPL under which Ubuntu is being released. Enabling multimedia support for formats requiring non-GPL codecs in Ubuntu 7.04 was a pain. This is now child's play in Ubuntu 7.10
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This is another common worm that infects computers and spreads from an infected system to another using Windows APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), emails, file-sharing networks and network shares.
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