Archive for the ‘Ubuntu’ Category

List, backup or Restore installed packages on Debian and Ubuntu

By admin on January 5th, 2010

The problem
Many a time I have re-installed my system from scratch or created a new system, but get sick of continually installing the same packages over and over. Its annoying when 2 or 3 months down the line you want to use a program you used to have (or have on another system) only to find its not yet installed. Sure, an apt-get install only takes a few minutes for a single piece of software, but that’s a few minutes a geek like me could better spend doing something productive.

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Encrypting your Ubuntu swap partition

By admin on January 5th, 2010

What is swap?
Even if you encrypt data on your partitions, something that is often overlooked is your swap partition. Swap is where linux ’swaps’ programs (and their stored data) from physical system memory onto the hard disk when they are not used. When those programs become used again, the system ’swaps’ them back into memory. This approach can allow you to run more programs than you have RAM for, at the cost of delay – for example when programs are swapped back into RAM from disk.

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Freesat HD Mythtv 0.22 Linux PVR with Ubuntu Howto – Part 3

By admin on January 5th, 2010

This is part 3 of the MythTV freesat howto, following on from Part 1 and Part 2 posted earlier on this blog.

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Freesat HD Mythtv 0.22 Linux PVR with Ubuntu Howto – Part 1

By admin on January 2nd, 2010

What’s all this then?

In the UK (and many places throughout the world) there are digital TV platforms available via satellite (or sometimes Terrestrial transmitters) which allow you to receive their programming with no subscription using standard DVBs/DVB-S (or DVB-T) equipment. Many set top boxes that can access these platforms are ‘closed’ and do not offer much in the way of choice, add-ons or upgrades not to mention the fact many have no High Definition capability. This is a guide to how to turn your linux box into a fully fledged HD digital TV reception platform with recording, pausing, rewinding of live TV as well as many other features such as commercial break removal, access to interactive content and electronic program guide (EPG). You can watch TV (live or recorded) from any networked PC in your house, as well as run a web interface to allow you to schedule, view, watch and delete recordings from any PC in your house (or to the web if you have the bandwidth and a way to forward your web server IP to the public internet). While this guide is based around the UK Freesat platform, using a different tuner card (such as a DVB-T card instead of DVB-S) it can easily be adapted to Terrestrial broadcasting.

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Ubuntu faster updates

By admin on December 31st, 2009

You may have noticed that the default installation of Ubuntu doesn’t get your full speed on downloads when updating. This is down to the fact every installation of Ubuntu comes with the main Ubuntu APT repository set as default, and those servers can get overcrowded with the amount of people out there running a default installation.

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