Frost Nova

Reinstalled Ubuntu on the Laptop today and after donning my tactical search keyword battle suit (pics coming soon) I finally found a solution to the fabled monitor resolution debacle. Next on the list was WPA. The Ubuntu site claims that “WPA support is built in right out of the box” so I gave it a try. It worked, but only after I enabled SSID broadcast, which I’m not that pleased about. But hey, I got net so meh.

Something else I’ve noticed is that changing the mouse sensitivity does NOTHING so I’ll have to use extremely precise touchpad gestures and have already found myself “rolling” my fingertip to avoid overshooting those close to the cursor GUI controls, something I never do in Windows. But honestly, what’s the point of a configuration utility that does nothing? And my trackpad’s scroll region is uber sensitive, so I’ll have to fix that.

The Desktop Effects “feature” while definitely pretty just gets annoying after a while. I favour fast boring interfaces to slow pretty ones, which is why I find OS X really hard to use. Gnome locked up reliably every time I tried to increase the size of a panel drawer above 28 pixels. This required a restart of X every time. Running killall x-session-manager from another tty did the trick. However, clicking the offending drawer crashes Gnome again and it has to be deleted from the panel before you click it. Then I managed to delete my top panel altogether but was able to restore the default Ubuntu panels by copying a config folder from a newly created user.

This is not exactly n00b stuff here. Delving into config files and terminal commands. A Windows killer Ubuntu is not.

Gnome quirks aside, Ubuntu is pretty OK. I really love that I can turn the Windows key into a modifier and use it in my custom shortcuts. This feature seriously rocks.

It still frustrates me that I have to google for everything I want to do. But this is probably due to impatience at my inexperience rather than faulty design. I know how to do most stuff in Windows now because I’ve been using and supporting it for over 10 years. I’m really am still an Ubuntu n00b.

Tomorrow’s task: playing movies through the TV-out in Ubuntu. Stay tuned!

I just found this post sitting in my drafts so thought I better finish it

A while ago I finally managed to get a Linux distribution running properly on my old Toshiba 2510CDS laptop. I’d been trying for a few weeks, mostly with Ubuntu somewhat unsuccessfully. Tried Puppy Linux and was impressed at how easy it was to get going, but it comes with a GUI by default but wanted a text-only server. So Slackware was next on the list after I read about its great support for older hardware.

The first install died while copying some packages; it was either a dodgy hard disk or because I burnt the ISO to a CD-RW (more likely). So I tried swapped the hard disk for an identical model out of our now dead Gateway Solo 2500 and reburnt to a CD-R and it worked fine. The longest part of the install was selecting the packages, but only because I am not one to embrace bloat, and like to trim to the most minimal install.

I’d say Slackware’s biggest drawback is the very limited package management. More specifically, it doesn’t consider dependencies between packages. So you install what you think you need only to have the program comically face vault on its arse the moment you try to run it. For me it was sendmail. I didn’t install all the required libraries. Was easy enough to fix after a quick googling. Still, it’s one of those things that I believe you shouldn’t have to do. I used to have to googlefix my Gentoo server a lot, after weird compile errors and I’m lazy and want it to just work.

But no Linux distro is perfect, and I can live with dumb package management. Especially with tools like slapt-get around that emulate Debian’s package management. It works well for installing packages but I’m not game to try an uninstall with dependencies, if you can even do that. It’s working now so no more touchy!

I just noticed my space is getting eaten up by something… Ooh! 1.7 GB of log files… *scurries off to fix*

Just now, I installed the new Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop, and I was not very impressed. I had the same problem as back when it was version 6.06. It didn’t detect my LCD’s native resolution which is 1400×1050. For an operating system that claims to “Just Work” it still has a long way to go in terms of hardware support. I remember last time I tried to fix this, it involved major amounts of Google trawling, and by the end of it I’d wasted several hours beating the OS into submission with command line apps, editing config files, and completely breaking X several times. No thanks.

If anyone out there is wondering why Windows is still the most popular desktop OS, it’s really not hard to see why. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu as a server OS. But a desktop OS needs to work out of the box. When you install Windows it does a pretty good job of hardware detection, and for any missing drivers, it’s not too much to expect the average non-tech user to shove in a couple of driver disks and click Next Next Next… Or even download the drivers. That’s not too hard. You now have a working computer.

But with Ubuntu what the hell do I do when I can’t select the proper monitor resolution? I can’t exactly insert the driver disk or download some Linux drivers. Can we really expect the average user to fuck around in the command line for hours to get it to work? I don’t think so.

Most people honestly don’t give a shit about what OS their computer runs, as long as they can use it. I see this a lot in my job, and I totally sympathise with non-tech users. Computers are just tools that have become a necessity for modern life. When our tools don’t work, we can’t do our job.

For now at least, the Windows vs. Ubuntu argument simply comes down to market share. Windows is used in most workplaces and homes, therefore most people are comfortable using Windows; and the cycle of dominance continues. The average user doesn’t have a spare few hours to get to know a new OS. Desktop Ubuntu does have many benefits going for it, such as low cost, and decreased vulnerability to virus and spyware attacks (apparently). I can’t really think of any other benefits that would concern the average user.