In which The Author wishes he’d enabled Safe Search
If you’ve read the earlier entry The Price of Upgrading, you already know that last week I installed Ubuntu 13.10 onto my Netbook. I’m glad to say that the upgrade went smoothly enough, once I’d found one of the few places in Aberdare with fast and reliable wifi. I needed to tie up a couple of loose ends on Friday, but they were small enough tweaks that I was able to do them in Aberdare Library. All my files and settings were carried over without a hitch, and the whole process took about three hours in total. If I’d been running Windows, I’d probably still be installing the updates on the updates.
It wasn’t until Sunday evening that I noticed that things weren’t exactly right. Have a look at this screenshot and you’ll see what I mean:
In the top-right corner of the screen, you’ll see today’s date and time. I like to have the time and date displayed on the screen, because if I’m in the Library I know how long I’ve got left to do whatever it is I’m doing. On Sunday evening, however, I noticed that the time and date were no longer there.
I decided it was probably something trivial, so I opened up the System Settings panel and selected Time and Date. I was rather surprised to see that the checkboxes were already ticked, so (in theory) the time should have been visible as usual. I wondered whether the upgrade might have disabled the normal feature – earlier releases had a ‘Hibernate’ facility, but it’s been dropped in the last couple of versions. I wondered if, as with Hibernate, I’d have to edit a system file in order to enable it.
If that was the case, it was time to check out the user forums. Being Open Source, any matters arising with Ubuntu get posted there, and they’re usually ironed out within a few hours. Someone somewhere will have come across the problem and worked out the solution long before you’ve had chance to run the upgrade.
I mentioned previously that Ubuntu releases always have weird names. I started using it when the current version was Lucid Lynx; since then, we’ve had Maverick Meerkat, Natty Narwhal, Oneiric Ocelot, Precise Pangolin, Quantal Quetzal, Raring Ringtail, and now Saucy Salamander. I don’t know who thinks of these names, but they’re pretty cool. In fact, when you consult the Internet, it’s usually enough to type the first half of the name into the search engine to narrow it down.
Here’s this month’s useful tip: Never type ‘Saucy show time’ into a search engine – especially if you haven’t enabled your Parental Controls first.
I’m not easily shocked, but some of those girls must be double-jointed…
An Autobiography in Random Chapters 