monline

Four popular solutions:

1. Mac OS X (starting with Tiger) provides bandwidth throttling capabilities through the built-in ipfw firewall. It's well described in this macosxhints.com article. You'll need a bit of commandline knowledge though.
2. WaterRoof is a GUI frontend to ipfw and somebody posted a nice tutorial on how to use it to throttle network bandwidth.
3. There's an even easier way and it's called Entonnoir. It's a small GUI app that requires almost no networking knowledge. However it's not open-source so you can never know what you get your hands on.
4. If you're just in need to limit your browsing bandwidth (eg. for web development and testing), you can always use one of the many HTTP proxies that support bandwidth throttling. One of them is the excellent Charles Web Debugging Proxy (but it's only a 30-day shareware so you either buy it or look for an open-source alternative).

• the tb-extra-mailbox-sep workaround (in case you're using Thunderbird as a client and mbox as a storage format on the server)
• problem with copying messages to the Sent folder
• problem with attachments

The two most popular solutions:

• trickle, a userspace bandwidth shaper. It's just this easy:
  
  trickle -d 200 -u 30 firefox
• Wonder Shaper, a kernelspace bandwidth shaper. More efficient for interface-level bandwidth shaping (but does not support per application control at all).

The link takes you to the relevant post on the Adaptec Linux blog where you can pick up all the bits necessary to make ASM work on Ubuntu/Debian. I tried to install asm_linux_x86_v5_30_17509.rpm on an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) system with the Adaptec RAID 3405 controller and 4 Samsung SATA drives. Here's what worked for me ...

There's some sort of conflict between the "Tab Mix Plus" extension and the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" extension (the latter is installed by default on Ubuntu). If both extensions are enabled and you've the "Web Developer" extension installed too, the toolbar of the latter seems to disappear from time to time. The solution: disable one of the two extensions (I used to give up the Ubuntu extension), exit Firefox, delete the localstore.rdf file from your profile, start Firefox. Note that this will remove all of your toolbar customizations, thus you'll have to redo them after the cleanup.

There's a "well known" bug in all recent Flash Player versions on the linux platform published in the last couple of years. It makes it impossible to display text with the proper fonts in certain languages using an out-of-the-box linux + Flash Player installation. In the linked bugreport people already figured out the solution: one has to specify a font with the required language coverage in the fontconfig configuration.

Apparently Ubuntu changed the startup process significantly in Karmic, since GDM is now not started by a startup script in one of the the /etc/rc[0-9].d directories, but something else. Even the /etc/init.d/gdm filesystem entry was changed: it's now a symlink pointing to /lib/init/upstart-job. The latter is part of the upstart package which has the following description ...

The information_schema in MySQL 5.x gives you the opportunity to dig into the database metadata. Unfortunately it's slow like hell. I've attempted to write a query that returns all foreign keys that have no index defined on their columns. It seems that information_schema needs a lot more tuning, because my query results in the following error message:

This just the kind of help that a casual software raid (mdadm) user -like me- needs.