Ryan Marcus — It’s all Frank’s fault!

As I am sure anyone with their music on a different internal drive has noticed, not all of your internal hard disks are mounted automatically at boot. However, getting an internal hard drive to automatically mount is fairly easy.

First, reboot your computer to make sure that no other drives are mounted. Then, mount the internal drive you wish to have mount automatically. You can do this by selected the drive from the “Places” menu and entering your password.

Now, open a new terminal and enter this:

df

Look for the drive mounted at /media/disk. For me, this was /dev/sdb1.

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1            152333348  24986968 119608276  18% /
tmpfs                  1036224         0   1036224   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                 1036224       104   1036120   1% /var/run
varlock                1036224         0   1036224   0% /var/lock
udev                   1036224      2856   1033368   1% /dev
tmpfs                  1036224       384   1035840   1% /dev/shm
lrm                    1036224      2000   1034224   1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile
/dev/sdb1 240362656 219662284   8490572  97% /media/disk

Quit any applications that may be using that disk (Music players, file browsers, etc.) and enter this:

sudo umount /media/disk

Once the drive is unmounted (which is should be after you enter your password) enter this:

sudo mkdir /media/disk

Then, open your fstab file:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

In the new gedit window (which will appear after you enter your password), enter this at the bottom of the file:

/device/path /media/disk    fs_type rw    0    0

Make sure to replace /device/path with the device mounted in /media/disk when you ran df. fs_type should be the file system type of the drive, probably ext3. Those are TABS, not spaces, between each item.

Save the file, and restart to make sure your drive auto-mounts.

If you use dual-screens, Ubuntu Ibex, and the Nvidia drivers, you were probably just as mad as I was when you configured your dual-screen setup, clicked the handy “Save to X Configuration” button, and saw your nvidia-settings window disappear.

Ya, its a bug. Luckily, it is easy to fix. Apparently nvidia-settings doesn’t like overwritting the default Xorg file. In order to make it happy, open a new terminal and type:

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup
sudo /usr/bin/nvidia-settings

Set up your dual-screen settings, click the “Apply” button, and then click the “Save to X Configuration” button. You’ll be prompted to enter a path. Enter this:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

And press “Save.”

Restart your computer/Xorg to make sure it worked. If something went wrong, restore the xorg.conf_backup file to its previous glory and try again.

I’ve been using Ibex for about a week now (since the release, so I suppose more like 8 days) and I figure I could bless you all with a semi-extensive review .

Look and feel: The first thing I noticed was the new default desktop — a drastic move away from KidPix orange to a much more professional, darker, and more abstract look. The darker desktop compliments the Human theme quite well, and adds a better feel to the desktop.

OpenOffice: Despite normally being on top of software updates, Ubuntu was slacking in a very noticable place: OpenOffice. Currently, the repo’s contain version 2.4 of OpenOffice. This was a big disspointment for me, so I did a little Googleing and found out it was really easy to install OpenOffice 3 in Ibex.

Graphic User Interface: There were quite a few noticable GUI changes in 8.10. The first you may notice is the new shutdown menu. It is now a pull-down with options that don’t have confirmation messages. Be careful! I’d still say it is an improvment over the old screen. If you press your computer’s power button, you’ll be prompted with a very nice looking window. And, as an extra added bonus, Pidgin will intergrate into your shutdown menu, so you can change your status and your computer’s status from the same place.’

You’ll also notice that the restircted driver manager is much, much nicer.

Restricted Drivers: If you install the “restricted” drivers for your Nvidia or ATI graphics card, you’ll notice that the control centers for both are also installed. The ATI control center can be found under Applications -> Accsessories, and the Nvidia control panel can be found under System -> Administration. This makes dual-monitor setup much, much faster, and much, much easier.

Currently, suspend and hibernate are broken on my Dell Latitude D531 (it worked in 8.04), but other then that, everything is working great. More to come.