I recently had to replace my motherboard on one of my PCs with a Nvidia GPU, which meant I had to figure out how to get Secure Boot working again with out-of-tree Nvidia kernel modules. Maintaining self-signed kernel modules is automated and zero-effort with dkms, but the initial setup takes a bit of legwork, so I figured I may as well document it for future reference.

This blog post specifically covers the use case of using a signed, standard distribution kernel provided by Debian/Ubuntu and using shim-signed to provision self-signed out of tree kernel modules that are registered with …

I actually bought my very first SSD last year during Black Friday, but I never got around to swapping out my hard drive until after exams, and to blog about it until now, heh. It's a 180GB Intel 330, snagged from Newegg for roughly $0.58/GB, which in late 2012 was considered a pretty good deal (although I expect SSD prices to dip even further this year). I've heard from friends previously that I should consider purchasing a SSD, but I never really gave it serious thought until after another hard drive failure.

So long story short, I got …

It turns out that after thoroughly testing the new laptop I got a few months back for hardware compatibility issues with Linux, there was one thing I forgot to check: the built-in SD card reader slot. And of course, it happens to be the one thing that doesn't work out of the box (aside from Nvidia's Optimus, but I'll save my rant on that topic for another day). However, it turns out that Realtek does distribute source code for their out-of-tree rts5229 kernel module, which is used by my laptop's SD card reader, so luckily enough it didn't take me …

Since I've spent a few hours of my time tracking the source and potential workarounds for this annoying bug, I figured that I may as well document my findings here. The latest Linux kernel (i.e. 3.6.0 at the time of writing) has a bug whereby if you play any audio file in VLC and try to change the volume, you'll hear a very annoying amount of audio distortion/noise. However, neither mplayer nor gstreamer-based players (Rhythmbox, Totem, etc.) seem to be affected (at least, not for me). More details available on the LKML. I don't seem to …

It's back to school season again, and I've decided to splurge some money on a new laptop a week or two ago. And of course, a new laptop means that I have to make sure that all the hardware components inside work with Linux, which is never a sure thing...

First things first, exactly what type of laptop was I looking for? Here's what I had after a quick brainstorming session:

• Something within a $500-$1000 CAD/USD price range. Optimally somewhere in the middle.
• Screen size 15"-16". (15.6" widescreen is preferred, minimum resolution I want is 1366x768 …