NVIDIA PRIME in Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.10, and a call for testing

Ubuntu 18.04 marked the transition to a new, more granular, packaging of the NVIDIA drivers, which, unfortunately, combined with a change in logind, and with the previous migration from Lightdm to Gdm3, caused (Intel+NVIDIA) hybrid laptops to stop working the way they used to in Ubuntu 16.xx and older. The following are the main issues experienced by […]

Hybrid Graphics in Ubuntu 14.04

Here’s a short list of the new features concerning hybrid graphics in Ubuntu 14.04: External displays connected to the NVIDIA GPU can now be used through the “nvidia-settings” panel. We used to disable them but this is no longer the case (also there’s a fix pending for LP: #1296020, in case your BIOS provides a […]

GPG key transition

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—– Hash: SHA1,SHA512 Sun, 01 Dec 2013 16:11:29 +0100 For a number of reasons, I’ve recently set up a new OpenPGP key, and will be transitioning away from my old one. The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the […]

On Heated Technical Discussions

In the light of the (relatively) recent heated technical discussions on display servers and init systems, I thought I would weigh in on how to handle this kind of discussions which, honestly, I find kind of annoying (at least their “heated” side). I do not represent my employer in any way and I base the […]

Hybrid Graphics with AMD and NVIDIA in Ubuntu 13.10 and 12.04.3

In this Ubuntu release cycle I worked, among other things, on improving user experience with hybrid systems and proprietary graphics drivers. The aim was to make it easier to enable the discrete card when in need of better performance i.e. when the integrated card wouldn’t be enough. In 13.10 I focused mainly on enablement, making […]

Getting back tethering on Android Jellybean

Apparently Android >= 4.1.2 breaks tethering in some cases. Basically you can connect to your phone but you will get no data whatsoever. This may be fair (at least from Google’s point of view) if your mobile phone operator doesn’t allow tethering and Google wants to respect that. If, like me, you’re using a virtual […]

An Indicator for Cryptkeeper

I’ve been very busy with life and work in general and I haven’t blogged for a few months now. I finally get the chance to talk about something I worked on in my spare time. I use Cryptkeeper to decrypt and mount some encrypted directories that I have in my Ubuntu One space but I […]

My father passed away

On 2 January my father passed away at 63, after a little more than a year fighting (a rather aggressive type of) lung cancer. I won’t go into the details of how it went but let it suffice to say that pain and tears have been our bread and butter. A little bit of history […]

SFTP uploads to the Ubuntu archive

Some time ago I had problems using ftp when uploading packages to upload.ubuntu.com (which stalled at about 13% for 100Mb uploads). Somehow sftp seems not to be affected by the problem. Here’s the relevant snippet to use in your ~/.dput.conf: [ubuntu] fqdn = upload.ubuntu.com method = sftp incoming = ubuntu login = <YOURUSERNAME> allow_unsigned_uploads = […]

Updates on Nvidia (285.05.09) and Fglrx (11.11)

As you might already know, this release cycle we’re providing updated proprietary graphics drivers using the -updates flavours of our driver packages (e.g. nvidia-current-updates, fglrx-updates). These updates are optional and, if you don’t want to run the risk of dealing with regressions, you may want to keep using the non-updates flavours (e.g. nvidia-current, fglrx, etc.). […]