Saturday 23 August 2008

UDF 2.5 support in Ubuntu, new network-manager

For the past week and half, I've been using the new network-manager packages from the network-manager team's PPA. My understanding was that these packages are pretty close to what will be included in Intrepid, while they seem to me like they have the benefit of being stable enough to be usable (and quite efficiently too!) on my work laptop... which needless to say, needs to be totally stable. I initially ran into small issues with password prompting for VPNs, but those have been resolved for a little while now. Anyway, here is the line you'll need to add to your sources.list file if you wish to try out the new network-manager packages:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu hardy main
One of the great things about the new packages is the possibility of running multiple connections concurrently (for example, both wireless and wired connections at the same time), and, in my opinion, much cleaner handling of multiple connection profiles -- for when you want to use static IPs for some place, DHCP elsewhere -- perfect for the mobile worker!

Also, I've struggled the other day with reading a UDF volume I created on my girlfriend's computer running Vista. Not expecting any issues with a newly burnt DVD, I happily chose to write the data in Vista's UDF format, only to notice that the specific format that is used is not recognized by Ubuntu, at least not in kernel 2.6.24-19. To add support for UDF 2.5, you will need to patch your kernel as directed in this fine Ubuntu Forums post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=718744

Happy hacking!

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