Occasional Thoughts

I already wrote about my experiences with Jaunty Jackalope on a HP EliteBook 8530w. Now this article is a delta update for Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10).

All in all hardware support is much better now. I did not had to install updated NVidia drivers (and still have no problems at all - even the random artifacts after waking up are gone) nor an updated firmware for WLAN. Even the function keys are partially working.

Spring Actionscript is a great library - no question. It makes it much easier to mock Cairngorm service delegates and rewire them for testing with FlexUnit. Testing the full event/command/delegate workflow is pretty easy.

However today I had quite some "fun" with the Maven artifact and it's transitive dependencies in combination with Maven 2.2.1. Spring Actionscript has some dependencies to these artifacts:

• as3commons-lang
• as3commons-logging
• as3commons-reflect

My mother wanted a simple laptop, which is sufficient for browsing the web, writing some emails and some letters. So I haven chosen a HP Compaq 615 since it has a very low price but does it's job. As I don't want to bother my mother with viruses and I wanted the flexibility to setup a system that just fits her needs, I installed Kubuntu. Therefore the next advantage of the HP Compaq 615 is that it has no Microsoft Tax - it's delivered with DR-DOS only.

Ubuntu is supported very well on this laptop. After some tweaks, I managed to get everything working but some function keys that are not really required.

Some days ago I got my new notebook that replaced my previous HP Compaq 8240: An HP EliteBook 8530w. Of course the first thing I did was to shrink the Windows Vista partition to make room for a fresh Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope installation (32  Bit).

Out of the box hardware support is pretty good - I just had some minor problems that I have sorted out in the meantime.

Do you have a Notebook running Linux?

Do you frequently use it in different network environments with different proxy configurations?

Are you sick of frequently reconfiguring all the applications that have their own proxy settings like the web browser, the Java IDE, the desktop and the applications that uses its settings, the other desktop environment that uses other settings... and so on?

If your answer to these questions is yes, yes and yes then read on. The solution I present here allows you to configure proxy settings in any of your applications just once and will even change the proxy settings automatically as soon as you connect your laptop to a network.