sudo apt-get install powertop

For some more detailed suggestions this is a good start: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PowerManagement/ReducedPower

Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research in the available options it came down between the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.

Thanks to these sites for some useful content:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/
• http://www.linlap.com/wiki/toshiba+portege+z830-10f
• http://blog.stevenocchipinti.com/2011/12/toshiba-portege-z830.html
• http://www.bestultrabooks.co/

In the end it came down to Toshiba having full-size VGA, HDMI and Ethernet connectors at the rear of the unit (no need for carrying adapters) and getting a very decent price rebate for the Toshiba.

The first and only task in the included Windows 7 OS was to create a recovery USB drive using the Toshiba included utility (on the desktop). You need a 12GB USB stick (found out the hard way after buying an 8GB version with the unit on advice of the sales guy).

After booting from a USB stick created from the Ubuntu 11.10 ISO (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download) with Ubuntu Bootdisk Creator (or alternatively UnetBootin) I opted to wipe the whole SSD drive. If you are not sure that you want to stick with Ubuntu it might be safer to try running from USB or dual-boot.

Note: you need to use the USB3 connector on the right-hand side of the machine to boot (not the rear USB2 connectors). Press the F-12 Function key when turning the unit off and choose the USB Boot option.

It always gives me strange pleasure to wipe a pristine new machine from all the rubbish that manufacturers pre-install and start with a clean system that I can customise to my needs (without having redundant stuff cluttering the system and waste valuable resources).  So enjoy that part

The Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) installation was extremely smooth. As predicted by the previous research all the hardware was detected automatically. Even Bluetooth and Toshiba Function keys (screen brightness and display switching) work without any tweaking.

I am currently looking into some SSD specific tweaks thanks to this article on ZDNET. I will post future updates on further experiences when it comes to battery-life and other day-2-day issues.

Update: I have made a tweak to improve disk I/O parameters to improve SSD performance

Disable the ‘elevator’ I/O scheduler in the kernel by editing the default Grub config (/etc/default/grub)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash elevator=noop"

Looks like this unit is definitely a good option for people looking for Ubuntu Notebook / Ultrabook hardware. Well done Toshiba ! Now I just want a refund for the wasted Windows license….

Enjoy your OPEN Ultrabook !

  by  adactio 

There are a few tools that will make this work a lot easier:

Google Chrome

Chrome does have some nice dedicated plug-ins to help with this task

• Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/geelfhphabnejjhdalkjhgipohgpdnoc)
• appMobi HTML5 XDK (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onmkoldigcfmebcinpmineoadckalllb)

Firefox

I am not aware of any plug-ins like Chrome, but as a hack I have found it useful to employ a user-agent switching plugin to trick the browser

User Agent Switcher (http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/) works well for this.

1. Download the User Agent Switcher Add-on for Firefox
2. Restart Firefox for the add-on change to take place.
3. To start a new browsing session using an emulated browser, go to Tools > User Agent Switcher and select the appropriate mobile web browser you want to emulate
4. To switch back to normal browsing, just select the default option from the above menu.

If you need more specific UA Strings check here: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html

For more serious work there are obviously dedicated emulators from the major Mobile OS vendors (but they need to be installed and configured for each platform):

• Android (http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html)
• iOS (http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/)
• WinPhone (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13890)
• Nokia (http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Web/)
• Opera (http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mini/)
• WebOS (http://developer.palm.com/)

PS: Nothing substitutes final QA testing on actual devices …

Scanning of barcodes

Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned.

Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog:

Let’s say you’re reading a magazine article you really like and want to share it with your friends. Just point Goggles at a part of the page, and instantly find a link to an online version to share immediately or read again later. You won’t even need the entire article in the frame. Goggles will also pull up more information from pages around the web where that text is mentioned, so its easier to learn about what you’re seeing.

Text recognition

You can use Google Googles to take images of printed text and have the result converted to text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Whil the results may vary our own test have shown good results on newspaper and magazines.

To download Google Goggles you can scan the QR code below

Google Goggles are currently available for both Android and iOS phones (just install via Android Market or Apple App Store. See http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/ for further details.

The Open Governance Index measures the true openness of eight open source projects – Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse – and analyses how governance, and not licenses, tell the full story of a project’s openness, across transparency, influence and control.

The full report can be downloaded free (email required) here.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl

Recent developments have only confirmed this suspision:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/08/08/facebooks-privacy-issues-are-even-deeper-than-we-knew/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ln2e0/facebook_patent_to_track_users_even_when_they_are/

Instead I will concentrate all of my content inside this blog (including as a backup for other social services I create). I believe the control over my own content is important enough for me to warrant the extra effort.

Facebook Delete

As the saying goes: ‘You are not a Facebook User – you are the Product’

  by  cogdogblog 

Thanks to a discussion on the Google Help forum (where 100′s of people wonder how this could have been called ‘upgrade’) I discovered this hack.

1. Create an empty document in LibreOffice or OpenOffice (MS Office is also reported to work)
2. Change the default styles (using Format –> Styles and Formatting (F11))
3. Upload the resulting document to Google Apps (Note: you will need to convert to GoogleDocs) and use as a template

To get the ARIAL font on Ubuntu I also had to do install the MS Fonts package

1. Why can’t you have Microsoft Office ?
2. I can not find ‘xyz’ font on this …. – why ?

I have managed (after some time) to convince my kids that there is no need for having a particular Word Processing Software and they are much better off knowing the concepts of text processing rather than some particular office package. Unfortunately I have had no look convincing many teachers that they should follow a similar principle ….

However the second is a bit harder as some schools specify the font that has to be used (go figure). The fact that this might not be available for all and choosing an open font family has obviously not occurred to many schools.

Hence the need to install some of these fonts:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
#to refresh the font cache (or you can reboot)
sudo fc-cache -fv

Note: You will have to enable the “multiverse” repositories in “Software Sources”

echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list
wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.1

To use USB devices on the clients you need to install the Extension Pack from the Oracle Site and install via the File –> Preferences.