Friday, November 20, 2009

Apple and the Programmers

Just read this article by Paul Graham about the recent problems with the approval process in the Apple AppStore.

Any platform needs a good programmer community to thrive and Apple may be damaging the iPhone in a big way. Good software is very important to any system and pissing off the makers of this software is never a good bet.

Maybe they can reverse this mistake before someone takes advantage.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Change boot order in Ubuntu 9.10

After installing the new Ubuntu 9.10 release (Karmic Koala) on my home PC (dual booting with Windows 7) the default operating system on boot is Ubuntu.

I have no problem with that but the wife complains so I set out to change the default entry in the Grub configuration. After looking without sucess for '/boot/grub/menu.lst' I went to the Ubuntu forums and found out the new release is using Grub2. And lots of things have changed (for the better from what I can see) including the old 'menu.lst' file.

In Grub2 the boot menu is created dinamically and the configuration files have moved. After looking around I found out the place to change the default boot entry. You have to edit the '/etc/default/grub' file and change the option 'GRUB_DEFAULT' to the number or string corresponding to the entry you want to boot by default (in my case menu entry 5). After changing this file you must run the following command to update the configuration:

$ sudo update-grub

To find out more about the new Grub2 configuration and usage in Ubuntu check this community page: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

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