• Some parts of KDE aren’t repainted. This is a really annoying bug. I don’t know how to describe it so just take a look at the following screenshot:
  

  KDE display bug

  
  This bug is not really reproducable and I am not sure who to blame for this but at least there is a bugfix: Just change the style from Oxygen to something else. I like QtCurve!
• Make double screen work. Well, I am running an ATI graphics card here on my notebook with the radeon driver:
  $ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M64-S [Mobility Radeon X2300]
  Double screen works well if you add the Virtual entry to your xorg.conf:

  Section "Screen"
          Identifier      "Default Screen"
          Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
          Device          "Configured Video Device"
          SubSection "Display"
                  Virtual 3120 1050
          EndSubSection
  EndSection

  . Just sum the widths of your screens as the first parameter and the height of your highest screen as the second one. After this you can move one screen next to the other with: xrandr --output DVI-0 --right-of LVDS

• Use auth_method: config with phpmyadmin: Entering this:

  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';
  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'foobar';

  in /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php doen’t work as it is ignored completely. I don’t know why, but when you enter

  $dbname='foo';

  in /etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php it works!

• Make sure you check out my post Gotchas, Bugs and their Fixes in Kubuntu Hardy Heron (8.4) since some of the points mentioned there are still applicable!

• Using an ATI graphics card the X server crashes after logout of KDE, a black screen is all that remains. All you can do now is strg+alt+del: I found the bugfix in launchpad, nice way!
• Well, the next bug is not new to hardy heron, but at least very annoying. Having some samba filesystem mounted the reboot/ shutdown process lasts longer as expected. When you disable the splash screen you can read the message CIFS VFS: no response for cmd 50.... I found the solution here: Unmount Samba filesystems before shutdown or reboot.
• Firebug eats the processor: Just install the package firebug instead of the addon: sudo aptitude install firebug
• If you want to use Firefox 3 as your browser, install gtk2-engines-qtcurve, go to System Settings/ Appearance/ GTK Styles and fonts and set Use another style: QtCurve, to eliminate the checkbox and radiobox rendering issue.
• Sending files from your Nokia phone to the pc doesn’t work: Just downgrade the bluez-utils package to fix this.

[hans@zommuntu:~]$ time ssh user@production_server "mysqldump --add-drop-table database_to_process -uUSER -pPASSWORD | gzip" | gunzip | mysql -uLOCALUSER -pLOCALPASSWORD database_name
real    0m4.389s
user    0m0.592s
sys     0m0.052s

Under five seconds! woot!!
Some words to explain this: First, you establish a ssh connection to the production_server. The gzipped dumped sql of the beloved database_to_process is transferred to your machine. Here it is gunzipped and written to your local database server into the database_name. The quotes are necessary as brackets to let the script know that the gzip command belongs to the ssh command.

#! /usr/bin/ruby

#
# Copyright (c) 2008 gauda.de
# All rights reserved.
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the same terms as Ruby itself.
#

require 'net/http'
require 'iconv'
require 'uri'

arg = URI.escape(Iconv.new('ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8').iconv(ARGV[0]))
str = Net::HTTP.new('www.google.com', 80).get("/translate_t?text=" + arg + "&langpair=de|en").body.match(/id\=result_box\ dir\="ltr">(\S*)<\/div>/)
if str
  puts Iconv.new('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-15').iconv(str[1])
else
  puts "error.."
end

Of course you can change the languages! Just edit the langpair=de|en at your will. Be sure to have ruby installed!

#!/bin/sh
if diff /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.single >/dev/null 2>&1
then
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.dual /etc/X11/xorg.conf
echo 'monitor: dual'
else
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.single /etc/X11/xorg.conf
echo 'monitor: single'
fi

It is also possible to switch between different network configurations. The reason for me was that I was able to use LAN in the office and use WLAN at home. Just append this to your changeConfiguration.sh:

if diff /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.home >/dev/null 2>&1
then
sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifdown eth1
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces.office /etc/network/interfaces
sudo ifup eth0
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf.office /etc/resolv.conf
echo 'network: office'
else
sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifdown eth1
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces.home /etc/network/interfaces
sudo ifup eth1
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf.home /etc/resolv.conf
echo 'network: home'
fi

Now, how does this work? First, create configuration files for each setup in the appropriate folders. In the first example it is /etc/X11/xorg.conf.single and /etc/X11/xorg.conf.dual, in the second example it is /etc/network/interfaces.office, /etc/network/interfaces.home, /etc/resolv.conf.home and /etc/resolv.conf.office. Put your configuration into these files.
This is no catch-it-all-script, you have to switch to another terminal screen (e.g. Ctrl + Alt + F2) and call the script: sh changeConfiguration.sh. It will tell you if you are driving single- or dual-screen and which network configuration you’ll use. Restart your X-server after calling.

Just for the case you are interested in configurating your network manually, this are the two files where the magic happens: /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf

But without any regret I can recommend wicd. This tool is so handy I am wondering why it isn’t the default network-manager in Ubuntu! Just add the repository deb http://apt.wicd.net gutsy extras to your sources.list and install it via sudo aptitude install wicd. I am running the current testing release 1.3.8 from 02. Dec 2007 and it’s working fine!

Another shot: The backspace behaviour is also different on Linux systems than it is on Windows. On Windows hitting the backspace is the same as history back, on Linux it is the same as page up. To change it to history back go to about:config and set browser.backspace_action to 0. Groovy!