Setting up Ubuntu on an SSD

Published in April 26th, 2012

Posted by Tom in tips

I recently purchased a new solid state drive (SSD) to replace my current hard drive (HDD). Since SSDs work so much differently than HDDs, it’s worth while to make some optimizations in Ubuntu for them. SSDs are much faster than HDDs, but have a limited number of writes before they wear out. This makes balancing [...]

Watch YouTube Videos Using VLC

Published in November 20th, 2011

Posted by Tom in tips

3 Comments

My Eee PC 901 is more than powerful enough to play back 480p video, but not when it’s playing though Adobe Flash Player. 408p YouTube videos drop frames and don’t play back at full framerate. YouTube has an experimental HTML5 video player that should offer better better performance than Flash. I enabled it, but it [...]

Persistent Touchpad Configuration in Ubuntu 11.10

Published in November 6th, 2011

Posted by Tom in tips

8 Comments

Recently I’ve fixed the tap-and-drag gesture, and swapped the right and middle click gestures on my netbook’s touchpad. I applied the configuration changes for these by adding the synclient configuration commands to Startup Applications. It didn’t take long before I noticed that some changes would revert after I suspended and woke the system. Even adding [...]

How-to Swap Two and Three Finger Tap Gestures

Published in November 4th, 2011

Posted by Tom in tips

3 Comments

I’m sure many heavy users of tabbed browsing use the middle mouse button much more than the right. Some number of Ubuntu releases ago, the two and three finger touchpad tap gestures were swapped to the current configuration, using two fingers for right click and three for middle. I’d rather have the middle button bound [...]

Fix for Touchpad Trouble in Ubuntu 11.10

Published in October 31st, 2011

Posted by Tom in tips

12 Comments

One of the issues introduced by Ubuntu 11.10 on my Eee PC 901 is touchpad dragging. The tap-and-drag gesture, for moving the cursor with the mouse button depressed, is too sensitive. I have to tap as fast I can to activate the gesture every time. Today I pursued the bug report for this issue to [...]

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