Being without a desktop I fell a bit behind on what all was going on in a lot of areas, mainly because I wasn’t doing much outside of just my standard use and work. I just found out about Ubuntu’s Enterprise Cloud feature in Ubuntu Server 9.10. It looks very interesting, and I look forward to giving it a try. I am however unclear on how data is stored on disk, does it use parity, or store multiple copies? I wasn’t able to find much information on this.

I installed Lucid Lynx, the upcoming LTS release of Ubuntu. It is currently in its alpha stage, and when I get my desktop set back up I will reinstall to Lucid Lynx. The performance was suffering greatly running in a VM on my laptop, I really want to see how it will perform with the SSD.

I am really unsure what I want to do with my cabinet. I certainly don’t want to sell it, but it is taking up significant space and I don’t have use for much of the equipment right now. If I end up not getting a roommate I can put it in the 2nd bedroom in a couple months, but for right now I have it sitting in the living room, and it is taking up more space than I’d like.

Well thats all the randomness I can go on about right now. I’m tired, and my back hurts and I haven’t been doing much outside of work.

I discovered that if you delete directories in your home directory like Templates and other system folders it will make an undesirable change to ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs changing the location of variables to $HOME/, which means if you want to add the directory back you have to edit the file.

This file defines the locations for Desktop, Music, Templates, etc so I went ahead and moved those files to Dropbox so I can maintain the files across multiple machines.

While I’m on the topic of these directories, I want to mention the awesomeness that is the Templates directory. If you add the file “Python Script.py” to that directory and put in the following text:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5
#
# Copyright 2009

import sys

# Enter text here

You can then right click in a directory, go to “Create Document” you will see “Python Script” listed and if you select it a .py file will be created with the previous text in it. This directory lets you create templates for anything you want and easily use it to create documents.

So I have been noticing horrible transfer speed problems on my laptop. I ran hdparm in BackTrack and got 34mb/sec in Ubuntu 2.53mb/sec. I am unable to set dma on the drive which is the real performance killer in this case. I have thus far found not solution other than compiling my own kernel, which I’m kinda annoyed about. If I wanted to be compiling kernels to get the latest features I would be using a distro that I would expect to have to do so. If I cannot find a solution I may have to move away from Ubuntu.