Comments on: Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501

By: Tim McCormack

Tim McCormack — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:23:05 +0000

On my laptop, the [Fn] [Arrow] brightness keys are reversed. (The key that indicates a brighter screen makes it dimmer, and vice versa.)

But that’s okay, because I think they should be switched anyway. :-)

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:09:14 +0000

No. I found some discussion of it on the web that made it sound like an Ubuntu problem — I guess earlier Ubuntu versions worked OK and this should be fixed in the next release.

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:35:49 +0000

Did you ever get your screen brightness keys to work? Mine don’t work either and neither do my speaker volume or mute keys.

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:11:34 +0000

I have another Linux guide for the Dell Inspiron 1501 here:
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/Dell Inspiron 1501

By: artiomix

artiomix — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:48:06 +0000

Try to ’sudo -s’ instead of ’sudo su -’. Anyway ’su’ is a bad idea. I home some day Fedora will move change it’s ideology from ’su’ to ’sudo’.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:21:47 +0000

Great point Dane. I have never really thought about auditing. Are there any other ways to log every command a root shell executes?

By: Dane

Dane — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:37:58 +0000

Overuse of sudo has one advantage that has helped me while sharing sysadmin duties with a co-worker: audit trail. I can examine the logs to see what command he used with sudo.

By: dr.bob

dr.bob — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:37:55 +0000

instead of ’sudo su’ you could type ’sudo -i’ (’i’ is for interactive). But I avoid that, instead I run a root shell tab in Konsole, and give it a distinctive color scheme, helping me remain aware when I’m working as root.

By: BlackNight

BlackNight — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:29:43 +0000

I too started using ’sudo su’, but for tutorials, guides, etc I keep using plain sudo, because most Ubuntu users (many of them no quite linux gurus :D) don’t know what’s sudo su supposed to do.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, I have no problem with the non-geek Ubuntu users, nor with Ubuntu (great distro, BTW), but it is the choice of many beginners, who lack linux know-how.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:29:40 +0000

Yes, it is hard for it not to become a habit, isn’t it? When every administrative command starts with sudo, it becomes like a little song in your head. That’s when I started to realize it was taking over my brain, and started doing ’sudo su -’ so I wouldn’t accidentally do something dumb like start my web browser with sudo! By the way, I didn’t mean to criticize you, I meant to criticize Ubuntu for just making everything sudo-able.