One of the first things I noticed on upgrading to Karmic was that notifications were lower than they were in Jaunty.
Like most people, at first, I thought this was a bug. The short answer is — it isn’t. The devs, in their infinite wisdom, think its better this way — the “top slot” for notifications is reserved for synchronous notifications, such as brightness and volume.
Karmic notification position
If you followed my guide on getting Ubuntu 9.04 to run nicely on the eeePC 1005HA, and have or are considering upgrading to Karmic, these few notes will help you.
A karmic Koala in a seashell
Ubuntu 9.10′s new login screen looks great — brown, black and white. Much improved over the previous version.
However, if you try out the Accessibility options, in particular, the “improve contrast” option, it goes ugly, with a nasty grey bar.
The problem is that, even after you deselect the option, the theme does not revert back, even after restarting again. The problem is that some needed theme files are deleted.
The solution is simple — you need to re-install gdm. Either fire up Synaptic, search for gdm, and then mark it for re-installation, or do sudo aptitude reinstall gdm in a terminal.
There you go — sexy login screen back again.
The 1005HA is one of the brand new Asus eeePC netbooks, and it is a great little machine — aside from the fact that it comes with Windows XP or a dumbed-down customised Xandros (allegedly — as time goes on, Asus seem to be selling out to Microsoft).
As the 1005HA is pretty new, it has a few odd hardware quirks that won’t be fully supported out of the box until the next release of Ubuntu.
Here I run through what I did to end up with a 100% working install — including all Fn hotkeys. The good news is that it is very easy!
My perfect Ubuntu setup on the 1005HA
I have several network NFS shares that I mount in Ubuntu using /etc/fstab. While this works fine, recent versions (I think it has been annoying me since Edgy) of Ubuntu have an annoying habit of creating a desktop icon for each share.
Annoying!
A desktop icon is fine for an SD card, or a USB stick, but it’s not ideal when you have a ton of network shares.
It is easy to turn off all desktop icons for mounts using gconf-editor. But I still want some of them (such as the aforementioned USB sticks) to show — just not the NFS mounts.
As it turns out, the solution is actually obvious: semi-permanent items should be mounted in the right place, under /mnt. If you mount elsewhere, e.g. under /home, you get the annoying icon. Under /mnt? No icon.
Although this turned out to be quite obvious, it is new to me — for well over a year now I’ve just had all desktop mount icons turned off waiting for the solution.