Occasional Thoughts

For quite a while the Ubuntu subversion package suffer from bad user certificates that do not follow the standards strictly. In case you have to authenticate with such a certificate subversion will return such an error message:

The root of this problem is that the Ubuntu packages link against libneon-gnutls, which handles certificates in a stricter way than libneon. A easy workaround in the past was to simply replace a replace the library link of libneon-gnutls to point to libneon:

sudo mv /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27.old
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libneon.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27

However once you do this in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin you will get a another error message instead:

OPTIONS of <url>': SSL handshake failed: SSL disabled due to library version mismatch (<url>)

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.

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.