Mikey Boldt

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Disable Bluetooth on Ubuntu Startup

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I don’t typically use Bluetooth, so I went looking for a setting to disable it on Ubuntu startup. After finding nothing, I turned to Google. Google found many ways, none of which seemed very friendly (things like sudoedit /etc/... to add a line to kill the service after it started, or add the kernel module to a blacklist, etc.). Then I came across a way to stop the Ubuntu Bluetooth service from being started by adding an override to the init script: 

sudo sh -c "echo 'manual' > /etc/init/bluetooth.override"

This is so much cleaner than the other ways; the service never starts, no config files are edited, and the module is still loaded for the rare case I do need Bluetooth.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

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Introduction

I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 today. My motivation for upgrade was twofold:

In short, the experience was good, with two small snags.

Snag 1: Wireless

As expected, the upgrade left my patched wireless driver in the dust. This was relatively simple to fix. I just downloaded the Broadcom driver from the above-referenced how-to, ran the b43-fwcutter command (with the vanilla apt-get version–no need to patch or hand-build anything), and voila: wifi.

Snag 2: Xmonad

Xmonad was a little trickier. When I tried to run the “Gnome with Xmonad” session from the login screen, it failed. syslog showed a segfault, in Xorg I believe. Boo.

I removed and re-installed the xmonad and gnome-panel packages. One encouraging bit: the Xsession entries automatically showed up, which I believe I had to do by hand before. Nice. The Xsession stayed open, but the window manager seemed missing.

I tried moving my ~/.xmonad/ directory. That got Xmonad to stay alive, though it seemed confused about the gnome desktop, and keyboard shortcuts weren’t working.

So, I moved my ~/.xmonad/ directory back. The window manager seemed missing again. ps showed the Xmonad process was defunct, and something more insightful: it was running ~/.xmonad/xmonad-x86_64-linux. I whacked this file, logged back in, and all is well. Must’ve been a stale version compiled against old libraries.

Update
I just found this issue in an Xmonad bug report. Hopefully this will be automated in the post-install script soon.

Conclusion

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin: so far, so good. I’m glad to have my wireless adapter better integrated into the kernel, and glad to be on an LTS release.

Install Emacs 24 in Ubuntu

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[2012-07-19] Update: Please see Damien Cassou’s comment describing his emacs snapshot PPA moving forward.

After reading several good things about emacs 24, I decided to give it a shot. A little googling led me to Damien Cassou’s emacs snapshot PPA. Simply ran the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
emacs-snapshot

Everything works great so far, specifically email in mew, chatting with jabber.el, my org files, and org2blog/wp. Played with the built-in ELPA package manager a little, and I really thing it will be nice to avoid manual package management.

Haven’t decided if/how often I’ll update my snapshot. Maybe until emacs 24 comes out in the Canonical packages? But then will I want to stay on the bleeding edge? Thoughts/suggestions/experiences?