Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it’s important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

One of the great things about Debian/Ubuntu is the consistency with which system documentation is placed in /usr/share/doc/

Assuming you have a web server installed this documentation is then available at http://localhost/doc/

It seems there is a bug in MySQL which is causing restores to run very slowly (hours instead of minutes)

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=33057

The bug is fixed in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/releasenotes-cs-5-0-67.html

But Ubuntu hasn’t updated yet….

One of the few things that Linux hasn’t done well is allowing the user to add or change monitors.

It looks like this is changing with the new utility xrandr.

I haven’t fine tuned this yet (or even tested it much) but I do have a dual head display - with the virtual screen spanning two displays.

I’ll come back and document this properly - but for now here’s what I did.

This is a very old blog post which has lost

The audio controls for the Dell hardware are less than obvious; I didn’t even notice that there is a built in microphone.

Below are screen grabs of the settings that work for me - giving audio at the right levels for Skype calls.

On the settings tab; ensure “capture” is enabled, “digital” seems to control the mic level - I found midway to be about right - higher levels caused distortion.

The basic search is:

aptitude search apache

Returns all packages that match