Dave's Tech Shop

This is a nice initiative:

Canonical aims to improve the Ubuntu user experience by fixing a multitude of minor usability glitches. The project, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will entail a collaborative effort by Canonical's new design team and the Ubuntu community to fix one hundred usability bugs before the release of Ubuntu 9.10.

Read more:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/06/canonical-to-boost-ubunt...

http://blog.davebsd.com/2009/06/10/one-hundred-paper-cuts/

R. McDougall over at climbing-the-hill.blogspot.com was motivated recently to mock the "Linux is not ready for the desktop" articles that are written by people who he feels are "carrying around the self-serving assumption that their preferred OS embodies the only real way to organize a software ecosystem." See his "Why Windows Is Not Ready For The Desktop" post.
 
And to counter the arguments that Linux is irrelevant on the desktop, see  Carla Schroder's post "1% Linux Market Share = 100% Dishonesty". Carla says, "If Linux is such a pipsqueak, why are there such relentless tides of propaganda and deception against it?"
She also references Matt Asay's article,

Keith Curtis worked at Microsoft for 11 years, coding on Windows, Office, and at Microsoft's research department, before leaving the Redmond giant. Call it a revelation, call it giving in to the devil's temptations, but he's now a complete open source and Linux advocate, and in his new book, "After the Software Wars", he explains why open source will prevail against Microsoft's proprietary model.

Curtis never actually used Linux until 2004, when he left Microsoft. Over the years, he turned into a Linux advocate, and now claims that thanks to the proprietary software model, we are living in "the dark ages of computing." This is what is scientifically known as doing a complete 180 (no, not a 360).

"The coolest authentication hardware device ever." -- Steve Gibson, Security Now!

Here are some excerpts from the Security Now! postcast discussing the Yubikey authentication hardware device Steve Gibson is referring to in his quote above.

Yubikey is an OpenID tool (one option is to use Yubico as your OpenID provider). Yubikey is also much, much more, as you will find out if you listen to the podcast.

Using Yubikey as an OpenID authenication tool, any time you needed to authenticate to an OpenID site you would just reach down and put your finger on the little touch surface of the YubiKey, and it would emit a one-time token.

YubiKey has a number of other features.  One is an anti-phishing feature. The authenticator is able to determine when the YubiKey's output was generated.

I found the following links helpful

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoint#TrackPoint_under_Xorg-7.4.2B_using_HAL

http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/09/scrolling-with-thinkpads-trackpoint-in.html (best)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Input

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-evdev/+bug/292047?comments=all

The GNU Grub FAQ has a section entitled "How to uninstall GRUB from my hard disk drive?"

I'll quote it below. However, I want to point out that I feel it is not an adequate answer. I found a better answer at another site, so keep reading.

There is no concept uninstall in boot loaders, because if you uninstall a boot loader, an unbootable machine would simply remain. So all you need to do is overwrite another boot loader you like to your disk, that is, install the boot loader without uninstalling GRUB.

For example, if you want to install the boot loader for Windows, just run FDISK /MBR on Windows. If you want to install LILO (I can't imagine why you want to do such a thing, though), run /sbin/lilo on GNU/Linux

 Here is where I found the better answer: