I have a new Dell Precision M6500 laptop. It replaces my 4 year old Dell XPS M1710.

Installing Ubuntu (10.04) was straightforward. All hardware was automatically detected and everything worked out of the box. The hardest part of the Ubuntu installation was the removal of the pesky "Windows 7" sticker ;)

The performance of this new machine is amazing. The combination of the quad core Intel i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM and an SSD drive makes the machine fly.

But I will miss the built-in LEDs of the XPS.

After upgrading a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 the machine was so slow it was barely usable. top was showing a load average of 7 after opening Firefox or OpenOffice.

Strangely no command was using more than 10% of the CPU, memory consumption seemed pretty normal and there was barely any disk activity. But the system was painfully slow.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) some buttons no longer work in Eclipse 3.5. Clicking has no effect but keyboard shortcuts still work.

The user guide of the HTC Hero explains that Windows users can do tethering through the (Windows-only) HTC Sync software. I assumed that tethering on Ubuntu would be impossible without rooting the phone - just like any other Android device - but I was wrong.

It turns out that USB tethering on Ubuntu is even easier than on Windows

Earlier today I had to rotate an animated GIF. I thought I was in for a tough ride but it turns out to be pretty easy to do.

All you need to do is to open the animated GIF in GIMP. Each frame of the animation is shown as a separate layer). Next you can rotate the image using "Image > Transform > Rotate" and save it. During the save GIMP asks whether you want to flatten the image or save it as an animation.

Straightforward.