Some Ubuntu 18.04 problems fixed today

I’ve drafted but not published a long list of problems I’ve experienced with Ubuntu 18.04. In short it’s been one of the worst desktop releases of Ubuntu I’ve used. My experience on servers has been fine. Anyway I haven’t looked into the details of these patches but: libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37:amd64 (2.22.6-0ubuntu0.18.04.1) libjavascriptcoregtk-4.0-18:amd64 (2.22.6-0ubuntu0.18.04.1) These package releases seem …

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MTA for linux systems

I’ve mostly been using msmtp as a mail transport agent on my linux systems but I wanted to review what was available: nullmailer – 2.1 released 2017-Oct, nullmailer on github msmtp: 1.6.6 released 2016-Nov, msmtp on sourceforge dma – 0.11 released 2016-Feb, dma on github ssmtp – unmaintained esmtp – unmaintained My preference is something hosted on github …

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Disabling NetworkManager dnsmasq integration

I’ve disliked the NetworkManager dnsmasq integration for some time. As far as I understand it has caching turned off by default so I’m not sure what the rationale is at all. So disabling means 1 less system process and less magic on the system (since resolv.conf will reflect the actual nameserver settings rather than be …

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Reducing memory usage of rsyslog

I’ve never been a big fan of rsyslog, preferring syslog-ng instead. However, I am giving rsyslog another chance. One of my biggest problems with rsyslog has been it’s high memory usage, documented by many people in many complaints that can be found using google. Now this emmory is usually, though not always, virtual and not …

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Performance problems with FreeTDS

So FreeTDS is the glue between a linux systems and SQL Server, among other things. For my purposes I’m mainly using it to run Rails with a SQL Server backend. My understanding is that the alternatives to FreeTDS are Microsoft’s SQL Server ODBC Driver 1.0 for Linux or, if using JRuby, Microsoft’s JDBC Driver for SQL Server. But why …

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The sad state of linux desktop environments

I run Ubuntu on my desktop and have since Ubuntu’s first release (4.10) and the current release, 11.10, is the first that I am going to skip over entirely.  The reason is that the choice of desktop environments is poor.  I upgraded my HTPC to 11.10 and tried every desktop environment available: Gnome Shell, Unity, …

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