howto

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) (though I keep typing “gusty”) was released today. I tried the upgrade directly from my Feisty 7.04 desktop, using update manager. However, though things started well enough, soon enough my download speed had dropped to 20kb/s and my estimated completion time had trailed off to 22 hours. Ack. Not nearly quick enough for me, since I’ve been impatiently waiting for the non-beta release for days.

So, what’s the alternative? As usual, bittorrent provides speedy downloads for popular files, and this one counts. To upgrade a current installation, get the .torrent file for the 7.10 alternate iso image from the Ubuntu 7.10 Releases page, and open it with your favorite torrent application. My speed is about 25 times faster downloading via this method. I will be seeding the file when I can, as well, to make sure this process is as fast for others as it can be.

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Changing my default mail client in Ubuntu turned out to be one of the easiest config changes I’ve ever made in Linux. In Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), the default mail application is Evolution, and I had been putting off changing this to the application I really used — Mozilla’s Thunderbird — because (based on past experience with desktop Linuxes) I was expecting this to be a painful process. Ultimately, I didn’t have to touch Firefox (my default browser, from which I’m launching ‘mailto’ events), I didn’t have to manually edit any configuration files, and I didn’t even have to look very far.

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Summary:

For my own rerence and your delectation, I’m going to talk about the Cisco IOS “show history” command use and defaults, with a brief comparison to Unix-type “history” plus grep. Following that, I’ll discuss changing the history buffer size for a single session, writing the buffer size change to config, and how to display the currently configured history buffer size. Commands used:

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