As Skype voice recording stopped working for me after upgrading from Karmic to Lucid, I thought I would document what I needed to do to fix it:
Apparently, PulseAudio had my microphone muted although KMixer did not show this. The mute could easily be removed using pavucontrol, though.
In order to speed up the general performance of my personal computer I put an Intel X25-M SSD into it some time ago and made sure that most binaries that are needed to start up Linux are loaded from the SSD. I could not go without a conventional hard disk, though, because the storage capacity of typical SSDs (or the budget that I am willing to spend) is still too limited. While boot times already improved dramatically after adding the SSD, mounting the file systems located on my conventional hard disk was still limiting the overall speed of the boot process.
That was when I read about the performance improvements introduced by the ext4 file system. (more…)
A picture is worth a thousand words 
More answers than I had expected…
Being both a Firefox and (K)ubuntu user I was awaiting the Firefox 3.5 release last week only to find out that a branded Firefox 3.5 release will not be made available for Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04), but only for its successor release, Karmic Koala.
Instead, there are various “Shiretoko Browser” incarnations available for Jaunty, the artwork of which I do not consider very appealing.
Still, I wanted to use Firefox 3.5 due to the speed improvements it offers compared to its predecessor.
Well, Firefox is free open source software, so all I had to was to fetch its source code from the Ubuntu Mozilla Security Team PPA and change the branding. The result is available in yet another PPA I created. Detailed installation instructions are available on the PPA page.
The (at least by me) long-awaited KDE 4.2 release has hit the road! What can I say: It’s beautiful and now contains most of the features that one wanted from a modern desktop environment that were still missing in KDE 4.1. I think I will write a more-detailed article about KDE 4.2 in a couple of days and so will concentrate today on a feature that many people were missing in previous 4.x releases: Icons on the desktop. Yes, there were some workarounds in 4.1.x like placing a large folder view plasmoid on the desktop, but nobody really liked it. In 4.2 the whole desktop becomes a large folder view at the user’s command just as one is used to from KDE 3.5 or Windows. To activate it, just right click on the new shiny desktop and select Appearance Settings from the context menu. Select “Folder View” from the “Type” drop-down and you are done.
