ext3cow - A Versioning Filesystem For Linux

The race is on. The only question now is how long it will take linux hackers to produce a GUI on top of the ext3cow file system to compete with Apple's Time Machine.

One thing's for certain, Apple's gotten the design right with the zoomable UI. It ain't easy. But the results will be worth it.

It seems to me that the short route to the zoomable versioning UI on linux would be to simply build the implementation on top of Beryl/Emerald. Beryl already has support for the zooming. The only problem is that in order to make it work right, you've got to throw away all of the layout management that both GNOME and KDE have built-in. Nevertheless, I still believe this is the right answer.

Tuning MythTV Font Sizes (Watch Recordings)

If you've struggled tuning MythTV's font sizes; for instance, those in the watch recordings screen, try this.

On my prehistoric 27" television, the following settings in the monitor section of xorg.conf got the watch recordings fonts to grow without the other screen fonts getting out of control:

DisplaySize 280 210 # 559 419

I noted the actual mm size of the screen in the comments. I used half of those numbers to get the fonts right. YMMV.

Once you make the change to xorg.conf, you can restart X by keying Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.

Broadcom BCM4306 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

I've now completed upgrading all of my machines to various versions of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and I'm pleased to report that it has gone more smoothly than any previous version of Ubuntu in each case. I've got 3 machines running Ubuntu and 2 running Kubuntu, and with the exception of the nvidia drivers on my dual opteron AMD64 Kubuntu at work, everything works great.

One thing that may not be obvious, even for seasoned Linux users, is that much less configuration is required with ndiswrapper on Feisty. If you're using a wireless laptop with Feisty, and like me, you've got a Broadcom bcm4306 card, you actually don't have to do much of anything to get wireless working with Feisty.

Simply install the package bcm43xx-fwcutter from your favorite package manager (synaptic, adept, or good ole apt-get or aptitude) and it will prompt you to download and install the firmware required for the Broadcom chipset. Once this install is complete, just reboot and the wireless chipset will connect without issue.

UPDATE

Thanks to Thomas who commented on this post below:

Just wanted to update everyone on bcm43xx-fwcutter. Because the boredlinks.googlepages.com/wl_apsta.o is no longer existent the setup is not automatic as it was before. Now you must download the driver yourself and extract the firmware and place it in your /lib/firmware folder.

Link to driver:

http://sidulus.textdrive.com/bcmwl5sys.zip

Command:

sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware ~/Desktop/bcmwl5.sys