I’ve been keeping the entries for Ubuntu backports in my sources.list for a long time now. They always been commented out though, since I don’t really trust them enough to keep my system up to date with backports. It wasn’t very elegant though so I decided to see if pinning could do the trick. After an email to the Ubuntu user list my /etc/apt/preferences now look like this:
Explanation: Make sure backports is not installed be default
Package: *
Pin: origin ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net
Pin-Priority: 499
This means that I can keep the backports’ entries in sources.list enabled without being bothered with updating the entire system when doing an apt-get upgrade.
There’s only a minor detail—update-notifier thinks that there are updates available, but once I click it no upgrades are found. I guess there are two pieces of code that checks for upgrades, one doesn’t handle pinning and one does.
[Edited] It seems my whinging about update-notifier's inability to handle pinning was a little premature. It seemed it just needed some time to adapt. Now it’s correctly respecting my whishes not to upgrade any packages available in backports.
I installed the Ubuntu build of 2.6.11 yesterday and noticed that my touchpad didn’t work properly. It felt sluggish and tapping it didn’t work at all. A bit of googling turned up this and this.
I didn’t bother with the Synaptics driver for X.org, mostly since I wasn’t sure the suggested kernel patches are in the Ubuntu kernel. Also, I can live with 2.6.10 until Breezy Badger… with the focus on laptops I’ve seen on the Ubuntu dev-list I can’t imagine they’d let such an obvious thing as a non-functioning touchpad slip through.
In this post I described
my udev setup. The one drawback with using udev that way is that I need to
cll pmount manually everytime. Yesterday I stumbled across some posts on the
the Ubuntu mailing list and I’ve started liking Gnome’s Volume Manager a
little better since.
Using
e2label
I set the label on my ext2 partition. This causes
pmount
to mount the partition using that name.
Then of course I didn’t want the device itself (/dev/sda in most cases) to
be mounted. As an experiment I modified my udev rule to only apply to the
device:
![[Digg]](http://therning.org/magnus/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Reddit]](http://therning.org/magnus/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
