I recently got a Three Skypephone and found that it could be paired to your PC and used as a modem. The software provided was Windows-only, so I set about looking for a way to connect my Ubuntu laptop as this is what I’ll be using any time I’m away from home.

The closest match I found was this tutorial at davesource, but it didn’t work right off the bat for me. All it took, however, was a few restarts to get bluetooth playing nicely - then I disabled my existing network connections:


sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo ifconfig lo down


Then edited the gprs-connect-chat script from davesource’s tutorial so that line 47:


OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet2.voicestream.com","",0,0' \


looks like:


OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","three.co.uk","",0,0' \


I then followed the connection routine detailed in the davesource tutorial and after a short while I was up and running - fired up Firefox and was able to connect straight away.

Speed was pretty good, the service I selected with my plan was “Broadband Lite” and it isn’t an overstatement, you get pretty decent performance. This was with my 3G signal indicator at 3 out of 4 bars.

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Quick one tonight - I’m currently attempting to breathe some new life in to an old laptop (a Sony Vaio purchased to kick off my University days in Summer 2002). As you’d expect, my first decision was to switch to Ubuntu rather than chug along with Windows XP, so I ran the latest official CD image. When the X Server (Graphical Interface) loaded up, the top half of my screen was fine and displayed as normal, however the bottom half was a hazy mash of lines and squiggles (official technical term there).

Having restarted the machine several times, disconnected USB devices and so on as per the usual suspects, the problem persisted. A random decision to choose “Log Out” instead of “Shut Down” led me to a login screen on the Live CD, which auto-logs in to the default ubuntu user again after 10 seconds. This time when it logged in, the screen displayed correctly.

No idea what caused all this, but in case you’re hitting the same wall I thought I’d put what worked for me online so you have something to try.

Quick one - if you are using an Ubuntu Live CD to access your NTFS drive and deleting files, you might wonder what’s happening to those files: they’re disappearing from view but your free disk space isn’t increasing; They’re not in the trash.

It actually creates a hidden folder on the NTFS drive named .Trash-ubuntu  (replace ubuntu with whatever username you are logged in as - default for an Ubuntu live session is “ubuntu”).

To see this folder, navigate to your NTFS drive and hit Ctrl+H, which will show hidden files/folders. Deleting the files from this folder removes them permanently, freeing up that precious disk space.

I recently had a bit of what we call in the industry “Windows-Death”. I couldn’t get in to my Windows account for love nor money (actually, money may have helped…) so I decided to bite the bullet and go back to using Ubuntu full time. The only thing that stopped me last time was a lack of support for my VoIP handset, but I have that set up on another PC now so we’re all good.

I had a lot of mail stored in Mozilla Thunderbird that I hadn’t backed up in ages, so thankfully I was able to migrate my profile across relatively easily. Here’s how in case it happens to you:

I used the Live Session option on my Ubuntu CD to first go in and copy my Thunderbird profile to a different hard disk. It can be located in your user directory (Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\profiles; XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Local\Thunderbird\profiles). It’ll be a folder called something.default.

Copy that entire folder (preserving the name) to somewhere safe. Once you’re in Ubuntu, make sure you have access to that somewhere and then set up Thunderbird as per these instructions.

Once you have run Thunderbird once (make up some dummy information in the wizard so it creates you a profile and is ready to rock), close the program down and then using the terminal, type:
sudo cp -r your-safe-location/* /home/your-username/.mozilla-thunderbird/

Next, still in the terminal, type:
gksudo gedit /home/your-username/.mozilla-thunderbird/profiles.ini

Which will look something like:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1


[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=d8wxq6es.default
Default=1


Change the “Path=” to match the folder name that you copied across, then save the file. Close gedit, start up Thunderbird and that’s you ready to go!