you're looking good, opensource!

opensource gets another breakthrough today, as canonical launches launchpad personal package archive (PPA), an ubuntu linux developers service intended to extend collaboration in software development and give the community equal opportunity to build and package code for ubuntu on the desktop, server, and for mobile applications.

great news for those itching to modify packages and contribute to the furtherance of opensource! users can make changes on packages of their choice, and these will be published in the PPA system, somewhat like a special repository.

aptly, users get the updates from the system whenever new versions of the packages become available.

Pushing on

I recently got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta running on my HP Pavilion dv2001tu notebook, and I'm very happy with the way it's running. Here's what I've done and have been doing the past month. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, but some of the activities mentioned here could have been keeping you up late at nights, coveting much of the understated successes of
running Ubuntu on HP laptops. If this is indeed so, do let me know your woes and I'll see what I can do to help.

1. Started a clan network. Okay, so most of them are really old and have no appreciation whatsoever for the internet, much less understand what emails are, and personalized email addresses at that. So I'll leave this up to the younger ones, who will help me teach the older ones the basics. They are yet to be informed of this new responsibility. LOL.

2. Upgraded desktop computer to Feisty Fawn Beta, and dual-booted Feisty and XP on my Pavilion dv2001tu lappy. So far, I have not had any hair-tearing frustrations with Feisty. Devices seem to work off-the-box, and the quick keys also seem to work fine (except of course for HP QuickPlay, which doesn't do anything). Touchpad, wireless, pcm+pcm2 with muting, and built-in mic all work. I've managed to get the built-in webcam to run with Ekiga (more details in a future post).

3. Started on my own list of what works and what doesn't for the HP Pavilion dv2001tu. Will try to make this as authoritative and as non-biased as possible. I love them Acer, Lenovo, and of course, Compaq notebooks too, but since I exclusively use my dv2000, I won't be able to vouch that the hacks I apply are going to work with the others.

4. Worked on more and more domains and hostings. I eat hostings for affiliate sites and stuff, day in and day out. I've optimized apache and mysql for several half-a-million traffic/day sites. Log analyzers are your best friends. I recommend Splunk for those who want to dig through files like search engines. But there's always the basic awk, grep, and myriad of other commands you can script together for the job.

5. Promised myself I'd start updating more often. 'Nuff said. =)