To a free world

On Ubuntu 8.10, the default MTU of a network card is 1500. Normally, this causes no problem. I have an application called Elluminate which must connect to the network of Laval University with a mtu of 1480. This small tutorial will show you how to change it and also, how can that change be effective even if you restart the computer.
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Change for the session only

To check the MTU of a network card, use the command “ifconfig” as follows :

~$ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:a0:d1:a7:6d:7b
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Packets reçus:0 erreurs:0 :0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:1
collisions:0 lg file transmission:1000
Octets reçus:0 (0.0 B) Octets transmis:0 (0.0 B)
Interruption:216

We note that for my part, the MTU of my network card is 1500. Note that if you have a wireless card, there is good chance that the name is wlan0. To change the MTU, you must again use the ifconfig command by adding at the end, the word mtu followed by the new value you want it. Here’s an example:

sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1480

We can validate the change by using the ifconfig command again:

~$ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:a0:d1:a7:6d:7b
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1480 Metric:1
Packets reçus:0 erreurs:0 :0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:2
collisions:0 lg file transmission:1000
Octets reçus:0 (0.0 B) Octets transmis:0 (0.0 B)
Interruption:216
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Permanent change

To make this change permanent without having to redo this command after each reboot, we need to add a small script to be executed during the computer start-up when the network card become active. To do this, we must first create the script in the “/etc/network/if-up” folder.

You can use gedit, kate or your favorite text editor like this:

sudo gedit /etc/network/if-up.d/mtu

or

sudo kate /etc/network/if-up.d/mtu

Here is the code of the script:

#!/bin/sh
ifconfig eth0 mtu 1480

Again, if you want to change the mtu of your wireless card, his name is probably wlan0. It will therefore change eth0 by wlan0.

Once the script is created, it must be made executable by the system as follows:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/network/if-up.d/mtu

Now, simply reboot and the mtu should be changed!

Ubuntu is coming by default with OpenOffice 2.4, so, I decided to upgrade to version 3. To do this, there are two methods, either install it from “http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main deb” repository or manually from files directly downloaded on the OpenOffice web site. I started by trying the installation from the repository because it’s much simpler.

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Here is how:

Once your sound is working with the method I described a few days ago , we must now correct the problem with the bass that isn’t working.
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First, we must download hda-verb:

Good evening everyone!

If like me, you use an external keyboard, it may be useful to have the “Num Lock” button enabled by default when you start your computer. To do this, I found a very simple utility that allows you to do this. It’s numlockx. To install it, just run this command:
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Here’s one of my first problems I had during the installation of Ubuntu 8.10 distribution on my acer aspire 6920 laptop. This laptop has a HDA Intel ACL889 sound card.

The problem was that I had no sound. After some research on Google, I found that I had to update my version of the alsa to version 1.0.18a. The latest version being released was 1.0.19, so I decided to choose this one.
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To do this, we must begin by determining our version of alsa as follows :