ubuntu

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Review: Dell Precision m3800 laptop

I purchased a Dell Precision m3800 laptop in late 2015 and haven’t been this happy about a laptop since my XPS13 Sputnik The initial build I purchased was the non-Thunderbolt edition, which I immediately exchanged (and paid the extra $150) for the Thunderbolt-compatible edition. It was a Windows-installed edition, which I quickly dual-booted to include Ubuntu. Dell, at the time, sold the laptop directly with Ubuntu pre-installed, but stubbornly refuse to make public the ISO to install Ubuntu on similar hardware.

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Fixing NO_PUBKEY errors from Apt

I’ve been ignoring a problem updating Diodon (a great clipboard manager) whenever Ubuntu’s daily Update Manager tries to alert me of new software updates. I finally opened a shell prompt, ran apt-get update and got this error: signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 751A20CF523884B2 Here’s how to fix any NO_PUBKEY error in two simple steps: $ gpg --recv-keys 751A20CF523884B2 gpg: requesting key 523884B2 from hkp server keys.

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In-line upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 on my workstation at the office.

I love Debian’s in-line upgrades, especially with how seamless Canonical has made it within Ubuntu. Still, I have to question the speed of their CDN when downloading 1800 packages is going to take 8 more hours. Comcast and Speedtest.net have verified we have 10Mbit-15Mbit connectivity, so why all the slowness? One of my favorite features about World of Warcraft was the bittorrent client in their upgrade/installer software, allowing you to download patches in a fraction of the time.

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Sony Vaio VGN-BX760, dual screen output in Ubuntu 8.04

After a lot of digging and some tweaking, I finally have Ubuntu playing nicely on my work laptop, so wanted to post my findings here in hopes it can help someone else. My video chipset: $ lspci | grep Graphics 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) The annoyance I faced was that plugging an external monitor into the laptop before powering it on forced the laptop/monitor to be a mirrored/clone display output, which is annoying.

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