Blog – JoeRess.com

Swapping 2 and 3 finger touchpad taps on Xfce/Xubuntu

In Xubuntu I like to have a 2 finger tap as the middle button, and a 3 finger tap as right click. This is mostly to make opening and closing tabs in Firefox easier. By default on most operating systems it’s the other way round. I used to use synclient to do this but that stopped working in either 24.04 or maybe even 22.04. As usual, the Arch Wiki has the answer.

You create a file at

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf

and then paste the following into it:

Section "InputClass" Identifier "touchpad" Driver "libinput" MatchIsTouchpad "on" Option "Tapping" "on" Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr" EndSection

A quick reboot later and the 2 and 3 finger taps are swapped.

Booting Linux from CD or DVD on a Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro

While recently trying to resurrect my ancient 17″ Macbook Pro that will only boot from its optical drive, I kept getting stuck at a screen that said “Select CD-ROM Boot Type”. It had options for 1 and 2 but the keyboard didn’t work so I was unable to select either of them.

Thankfully I found this post from Mark Stanislav which had a great tip on how to overcome that. I had to adapt what Mark suggested though. I found that once you get into the boot menu by holding down alt (or option as they call it on Macs), I had to press and hold the 1 key while clicking to boot from the DVD. I then had to frantically mash the enter key over and over again until I saw the Grub menu and then wait an awfully long time for a distro to boot.

This method isn’t fool-proof though. I’d say it works about 20% of the time so it took me several attempts each time I wanted to boot Linux from the optical drive. No such song and dance with an OS X Lion DVD, of course. That just works™.

It’s worth mentioning that I tried to get this old Mac to boot from USB using Plop but I couldn’t get that to work. It booted to the Plop menu but the graphics were all weird and nothing I tried would get it to boot from USB. Hence having to burn DVDs and do all this to get Linux to boot.

Maybe someone will find this useful and hopefully I will remember to read this again in a few years when I next try to play with my old Mac.

NFT shit-list

This is a list of well-known people and companies who have shilled NFTs. It’s very much not exhaustive but I’ll try to update it when I spot new offenders. Feel free to tweet me examples that aren’t on the list.

Also feel free to check out my podcast Late Night Linux where we sometimes laugh at and/or get angry about these bastards.

Jack from Twitter

Tim Berners-Lee

Jimmy Wales

People who want to defile Stan Lee’s memory

Rishi Sunak (this may not actually happen)

Meta/Facebook/Instagram

Damien Hirst

CNN

Warner Bros./Lord of the Rings

Disgraced former president Trump

The National Handegg League

Starbucks

Ubuntu 20.10 Desktop to gain official Raspberry Pi support?

While Ubuntu server is officially supported on the Pi 2, 3, and 4 (including the new 8GB RAM variant of the Pi 4), getting the Ubuntu desktop running on the mini PC has so far been a community effort. Back before he became the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu Desktop, Martin Wimpress made and maintained some Ubuntu MATE images for various Pis. Unfortunately when Ubuntu 20.04 arrived in April this year, an Ubuntu MATE image for the Pi didn’t appear.

Fast forward to May and Martin did a series of live streams on YouTube to demonstrate his tool which turns Ubuntu Server into any of the Ubuntu desktop flavours called Desktopify. This was something that he did in his spare time and so there are still no official Ubuntu Desktop Images.

On S13E11 of the Ubuntu Podcast this week, Martin dropped something of a bombshell. He said “Maybe we’re working on Ubuntu Desktop for the Raspberry Pi”. This was during a discussion of the new 8GB RAM version of the Raspberry Pi 4, and referred back to an OMG Ubuntu! article about upcoming features of Ubuntu 20.10.

Does this definitely mean Ubuntu 20.10 will be officially supported on the Raspberry Pi? Well I won’t believe it until I see an official announcement but I’m pretty hopeful from what Martin said.

If you want to hear the specific part of the episode in question, you can listen on YouTube here: