Disabling Bluetooth in Ubuntu

Since I don’t use Bluetooth I’ve been wondering for some time how to permanently disable it in Ubuntu. There’s a menu item that allows to quickly disable it, but this setting doesn’t survive a restart. Despite some time spent searching around I have not found a reasonable solution to shut down Bluetooth. The only thing …

Disabling the ThinkPad TrackPoint in Ubuntu

One thing that has annoyed me since I switched to Ubuntu as my main operating system is the little red TrackPoint of my Thinkpad, situated in the middle of the keyboard. Often, when I’m typing something, I will hit it and the focus suddenly is on a different UI element. Today I finally found how …

Setting up samba shares in Ubuntu

One step of moving over from Mac OS X to Ubuntu was setting up my file shares that I’m using for serving media content to Openelec. For OS X I’ve used SMBUp to configure the folder sharing. Ubuntu supposedly makes it easy to share a folder, you just right click the candidate and choose “Share …

Installing OpenJDK 8 on Ubuntu

As part of setting up my new Ubuntu notebook I wanted to have Java 8 as the default JDK. Unfortunatly there’s only OpenJDK 7 available as a pre-built package and help.ubuntu.com suggests building it from scratch. It references a blog post that explains the required steps and it’s actually quite easy. Here’s how: Installing required …

The long goodbye: Leaving Mac OS X for Linux

I’ve been a Mac user for almost twenty years. While I’m still not quite ready to move away from it completely, I’ve taken the first steps lately: I’ve bought a new Thinkpad E540 and got started setting up GNU/Linux. My first tries with Debian Wheezy were painful and after a few installations I decided to …