I’m still enjoying the fresh new Ubunutu 9.04, and one of the nice new features is a firewall – which Canonical calls “Uncomplicated Firewall”. I’m usually not hooked on firewalls, but just for the fun of it I enabled the firewall on my laptop and it seems to work quite well. The firewall doesn’t seem to have any noticeable impact on system performance and as the laptop from time to time visits open wifi’s, it’s probably a good idea to have protection from other users on open networks.
I usually prefer surfing without www in front of domain names, and I do somehow except the site to act graceful no matter if the www is there or not. If you’ve been surfing with the www extension to this site the past few days, you accidentally hit my test-site with an access denied message. Sorry about that, but a major change is coming… hopefully soon.
In Kubuntu the default browser is Konquerer, but as a longtime Firefox user I wanted to use that as the system default browser. Googling around, I found a way to switch to the browser in Thunderbird, so that links in mails opened in Firefox, but it didn’t change in desktop links and other applications. Now another switcher found the solution. Acutally there isn’t much of a solution in it. It’s more a configuration thing, once you know where to fix it.
The new scheduled update to Kubunu hit the net as planned a few days ago. The new release is named Edgy Eft (the previous release was called Dapper Drake). This is not a Long Term Support release, but it is a stable release, so I upgraded. While it wasn’t a completely smooth process, I was running and at full speed within an hour. Here’s how I did it. The Dapper Drake was fully patched to the newest version of all installed packages.
If you are among the 70.000.000 users, who still use windows 98 or Windows Millennium, your operating system has reached end-of-life today and will no longer be patched for security or supported by Microsoft. If you can’t afford the update, you may consider upgrading to Ubuntu or some other free system for your computer.