If there would be an Oscar for the WORST firmware upgrade procedure (and associated drivers, documentation and general quality of software) Rikomagic should win this by a country mile ! Since all the information I found on the interwebs said Linux was not supported I ended up borrowing friends notebooks (as I don’t own any Windows machinery anymore). My main Toshiba Ultrabook seemed to have issues with picking up the USB from a Windows Virtual Machine).

Trying to install Google Earth on Ubuntu. You could just download the .deb file and run dpkg command, however I prefer to use it via a repo to make sure upgrades are installed as part of the system upgrades. http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/ Google Keys Note: this should not be necessary if you have use the GoogleTalk plugin or similar package from the Google DEB Repo cd /tmp/<br></br>wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub<br></br>sudo apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub<br></br>rm linux_signing_key.pub

Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) I have had issues running the Android SDK Tools. For example this error: ./adb<br></br>bash: ./adb: No such file or directory Check the multi-arch architectures installed on the system. sudo dpkg --print-architecture Mine only showed ‘amd64’. Turns out you need to add the i386 architecture and install libc6:i386,libncurses5:i386,libstdc++6:i386 library packages. sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386<br></br>sudo ./adb

My old Asus EEE PC 900 is the oldest piece of hardware I own. With an old Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM it’s never was the fastest kid on the block (in fact I never considered the Windows XP version of the same unit usable as it was very sluggish). However after owning it for nearly 7 years I am very surprised I can still use it. Granted I only use it occasionally when I am at home, but thanks to LXDE it was still usable.

Thanks to Paolo Rotolo there is now a Ubuntu Launchpad PPA for Android Studio sudo apt-add-repository ppa:paolorotolo/android-studio<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install android-studio

Connecting securely to your home network has always been a bit of a challenge since common home ADSL routers not normally contain any VPN Servers (those which do contain such are generally PPTP servers which I would hardly call secure these days). Which is probably a good thing as they would be horribly out of date considering the firmware release policies of retail router manufacturers. You could run/maintain your own dedicated server, but for most home networks that is overkill and out of the technical depth of most hobbyists.

Excellent coincidence that the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) fell into the Easter holidays. This gives me the time to install earlier than I normally have time for. This realease being a LTS (long-term support) release means it is a fairly conservative release. There are some nice enhancements and most importantly for me the 3.13 Kernel means finally Wacom Touch devices are supported without kernel mods. Unfortunately some things are still not included (such as the boot-repair tools not being part of the standard repos).

Unfortunately the mess that is UEFI Secure Boot still causes issues on some hardware. In my case it’s a Toshiba Z930 Ultrabook. I have documented the procedure to get it working here. However it turns out that there is no ‘Trusty’ release for the boot-repair utility. The fix is relatively easy. sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list<br></br>#change the following line from 'trusty' to 'saucy'<br></br>sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list You can then just finish with sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && (boot-repair &)

Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences. Installing dependencies Thanks to: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk Installing Android SDK Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install.

Finally found some time playing with a RaspberryPi and an attached PiFace Interface board to control some garden pumps and potentially an Aquaponics setup in the near future. Requirements Raspberry Pi (Model B in my case, but any will do) PiFace Interface board (http://www.piface.org.uk) Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) Install (I prefer the clean minimal install via https://githutb.com/hifi/raspbian-ua-netins). Configure the base system as per my previous base install. Install Apache & PHP sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-dev php5-cli php5-mcrypt curl raspi-config

As with most hardware manufacturers of hardware Foscam utility software is Windows or Mac only. The actual unit tested with the below is a FI9805E Outdoor POE camera. Installation The installation is relatively painless as the unit is set up to get the IP assignment via DHCP (check your routers DHCP assignment list). https://IP.ADDRESS.OF.CAM should get you to the web-admin interface. The default user is ‘admin’ with no (empty) password.

I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook. However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream.