I've found the cleanest way to upgrade Ubuntu is to do a fresh install.  Here is a list of steps that I take to upgrade.

I have a friend who recently informed me of their venture into the world of Linux.  I started to build up a good set of links and thought I would share.  Here you go.

The Ubuntu Guide - A Wiki for common setup and configuration tasks in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Tweak - Simplifies some Ubuntu configuration tasks as well as application and driver installation.

Using SSH is quick to manage your webspace.  It is much faster that FTP depending on the task.  I learned today that in Linux you can store your SSH connection in a the file "~/.ssh/config" using the following format.

Host myhost1
User username1
Port 8322
HostName machine.example1.com 

Once you've edited and saved this file with your SSH configuration settings you can start ssh sessions from the command like so.

I've been keeping documentation on my development life cycle processes.  Just recently, I realized that I could do away with a lot of these little tasks with shell scripts.  Here's a look at one of my "to-do lists" for setting up a Drupal site on my local Apache server.

Symbolic links work kind of like shortcuts in Windows.  I have found a couple of very useful scenarios.  The first is my local development environment.  For Linux users, it is best practice to keep all your files in your user folder.  For me, this is mainly to keep my system directories clean and to make backup of my files easier.  This leads me to my first usage:

1. Managing Development Files for Apache

For those of you that use Skype for business or personal use, I finally fixed my audio issues with Skype 2.0 in Ubuntu.  I was experiencing poor audio quality (low volume, choppy ouput) since I installed it.  The soluction was simple enough.  In the options menu select "Sound Devices" and then uncheck "Allow Skype to Automatically change my mixer levels".  I found that when I change this setting everything works fine.  The audio is now just a crisp as you can expe

If you're like me, you want to know how much time you're actually spending on projects. I've been using a very useful applet for Gnome desktop called Hamster. With Hamster, I'm able to start and stop time tracking on a particular task, enter previous times, and see time charts for days, weeks, and months. Here's a quick screen shot.

Unfortunately, this was not straight forward task for me, which may be due to my lack of skills. So, in order to ease someone else's pain, I'm posting my method of installing flex builder on Ubuntu 8.10.

1. Download Eclipse 3.3 Europa
   The download link for Europa 3.3 is post worthy in and of itself due to Eclipse Project's troublesome site navigation. I downloaded the Linux (x86/GTK 2) version on to my 32-bit machine (64 bit also available).

If you haven't heard, Adobe recently published the Flex in a Week video series. The bummer for us Linux users is that to watch the videos you need to install AMP, which is not compatible. However, today I found that you can watch the videos if you import the video series xml feed into Miro.

1. Install Miro
2. Go to "Channels"->"Add Channel"