This is a revision of my earlier assessment that tsclient is so slow it's useless. The thing came back to life somehow and it looks like it's thanks to either Dell or Microsoft. I upgraded to Karmic over Christmas with some hope that it might fix tsclient, but nothing changed. Then the server in Atlanta that I log in to was replaced with a brand-new monster of a machine running Windows 2008 Server. That did it. The terminal server client is again a functional piece of software, and my attempt to migrate entirely to Ubuntu is back on track.

There was one small hiccup: one of the recent updates to rdesktop must have overwritten the /usr/share/rdesktop/keymaps/common file, because all of a sudden I could not use the Caps Lock key on the remote desktop. That's OK. I googled it as usual, and I found help here. Also as usual, those lively Ubuntu forums will send you all sorts of places before you hit something useful. You're happy when you find it, then the next moment you appreciate paid customer support. Then the moment after that you think OK, but it didn't take that long, and it didn't cost a dime. There's room for all of us, it seems. I wish Microsoft the best of luck. I wish Canonical the same.

Next up: fix the "Connect to Server..." item on the Places menu in Gnome. I can't SSH into the home server from there anymore. I can do so from a terminal window, and I can still auto-mount my home folder on the server via NFS, as documented earlier here and here. Auto-mounted NFS shares are best anyway, because that way my stuff on the server is available on the client automatically at start-up.

On December 11, 2009 portaudit turned up a problem in a package called libtool-2.2.6a_1. So, as usual, I figured I'd go to whatever port that is, and do a portupgrade. Unfortunately, whereis libtool turned up no such port. What's the rookie accidental admin to do?
Take good notes, for one. While dabbling in an unrelated topic -- [...]

My migration to Ubuntu has just hit a major snag.
I spend most of my work day connected to a Windows Server 2003 machine sitting in a colocation facility in Atlanta. I write and run Stata code on it, use the MS Office products, a bit of Gmail -- the usual stuff. As it turns out, [...]

One drawback of a system that's giving you very little trouble is that between bouts of fixing whatever does occasionally go wrong you forget what you're supposed to do. We should all be this lucky, but it's still an annoyance.
FreeBSD, for example, will sometimes turn up a damaged package or two in response to #portaudit. [...]

The books I'm reading these days come with examples of code, saved on associated web sites. Sometimes that code is neatly packaged into a zip archive or tarball, with every piece of code sitting in a directory named after the chapter it was referenced in. But other times these web sites have the code sitting [...]

Today I had to install TOra with Oracle support. That was interesting. TOra is on the Synaptic list, but if you install it from there you only get PostgreSQL support. For anything else you need to build TOra from source. Instructions are here, courtesy of Brad Hudson. Follow them. In particular, do not skip [...]

Windows 7 has been officially launched after favorable pre-release reviews, but my own hankering has been to eventually replace my Windows XP Pro with some kind of UNIX. After a brief look at PC-BSD, I kind of fell into using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for most of the year on my testing machine.
Over the weekend I [...]

I have this Twitter search saved in my Google Reader. It works OK. One recent tweet by DismalTrader linked to an old Stata Journal article about demand estimation, saved on Scribd. This reminded me that The Stata Journal has a three-year moving wall: anything older than three years prior to the latest issue is available free, [...]

Microsoft makes this free utility called SyncToy. I don't know if it will come standard with Windows 7, but it probably should. It provides a very elegant way to back up your data to an external hard drive or to a Samba share. You can even schedule it to run regularly, say right after you're [...]

My daughter will be eight days old by the time I'm done writing this. She's on food intake and diaper watch, so among the things we brought home from the hospital was this pink sheet where we were supposed to record full diapers and feeding patterns. Of course we then filled it out, and when [...]