Three Wise Men

On the 21st of October Fantasy Flight Games posted this announcement on their web site:

“Fantasy Flight Games is delighted to announce the upcoming release of Merchant of Venus, a board game of space traders and alien riches. Two to four players race through the galaxy on a wild dash for cash, locating and establishing vital trade lines to transport goods from the planets where they’re common, to the planets where they can sell for maximum profit.”

Then on the 22nd of October Stronghold games posted the following announcement on their web site:

“Stronghold Games, in conjunction with the Designer and license holder, A. Richard Hamblen, announced yesterday that we will reprint “Richard Hamblen’s Merchant of Venus“. We look forward to bringing you this great game during 2012 !”

If you care about this publishing fiasco then read on …

Rolling Release Ubuntu is something a lot of people are talking about. Not so long ago it was announced that Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin will be an LTS release with support extended to five years for Desktop edition. Desktop edition was usually supported only for three years. Community has stirred again and again we have people crying out for a rolling release distribution. Something very well-known among Gentoo and Arch Linux users. Read on if you’d like to know why a rolling release would be a bad, bad idea. In fact it would be terrible idea.

Installing Oracle Java SDK in Ubuntu is a pain because not so long ago Oracle decided to change licensing of Java. Which in the long run will hurt only users. Distributions can no longer make automated installs of Oracle Java, users are required to agree with the license displayed on Oracle’s web site. Installing Java SDK in a ‘proper Ubuntu way’ is now a little bit tricky. Read on to learn how to do it.

UPDATE: Stock kernel driver is fixed in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangoling. Current kernel is 3.2.0-17-generic and everything has been working for quite some time.

If you are using Ubuntu (and probably other distributions too) and you have an on board Realtek RTL8168/8111E PCI Express network adapter you might find your network not working as it should. Slow connections or no connection at all and your logs full of messages like these:

Oct 02 09:13:25 machine kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.0: eth0: link up
Oct 02 12:45:17 machine kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.0: eth0: link up
Oct 02 12:45:20 machine kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.0: eth0: link up
Oct 02 13:15:12 machine kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.0: eth0: link up
Oct 02 13:15:13 machine kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.0: eth0: link up
Oct 02 13:22:13 machine kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.0: eth0: link up

Read on if you want to know why this happens and how to solve the problem.

Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011