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Sat, Apr 28, 2007
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..because I'm not a fan of software doing things for you. But I'm actually impressed by Ubuntu's latest release.
Not by the upgrade from a previous version - regardless of what anybody else says, I've never yet seen a successful Ubuntu upgrade, and we've got in installed on three different machines. I think the crowing moment was when Lou tried to upgrade Kubuntu and the result was a machine that didn't have KDE installed.
So I wasn't at all surprised that my laptop failed to even start an upgrade. But hey, I had the install CD and a USB CD-ROM, let's see how it goes.
It failed to boot past the splash screen. But in a weird way. I burned a new CD and it booted no worries. There seems to be an issue with our CD-RW disks - Lou's PC just failed to boot Kubuntu off one, but the same ISO on a different disk worked fine.
Anyway... my laptop is the only machine I actually like having Ubuntu on, partly because it's an ATI graphics chipset and sod all computing power, but mostly because I just don't use it enough to bother configuring it all my way, so a distro that auto-configures everything fairly sanely is a good thing to have.
The install was fairly quick, all things considered. I put Xubuntu on it last time, but I'm now running just Ubuntu, and it's an improvement, if only in things like fonts in Firefox - With a 1024x768 screen, good small fonts are vital.
In previous version of Ubuntu, installing all the non-free things like graphics drivers and codecs have been simple but not trivial: You had to hit google, the forums, the wiki, whatever. Not too taxing, but you couldn't do it alone.
I tried to play an AVI file, and the movie player loaded and told me it didn't have the codecs. So far, so similar. Then it offered to download and install gstreamer, so I told it to go for it. Bang, all the non-free codecs are in place, absolutely no research needed on my part. That's pretty impressive.
The ATI graphics driver has a bad reputation, and it's enough of a pig that I've never gotten it working on this laptop before. So it's saying something for Ubuntu that the driver was installed and working before I even looked to see if it was available in Synaptic yet. It's saying even more that I have a desktop cube and wobbly windows, although it WAS a bit of a palaver getting both at the same time. It's experimental software, so I can't really complain. Frankly, even if I hadn't gotten any of the snazzy eye candy set up, it would still be worth having the feature turned on just to get the workload out of the CPU and into the GPU where it belongs.
Suspend to RAM still doesn't seem to want to work, tho I only tried it once so far, but hibernate to disk is still fine, and that's the one I really want/need..
So I've read the "Vista vs Feisty" articles, and seen that they reckon it's a tie. Impressive, since just a few years ago, "Linux will never make it onto the desktop" was the order of the day, and now there are people complaining when the reviews don't think a Linux desktop is better than the latest Windows.
Feisty is genuinely impressive. In about a quarter of the time a Vista install takes, it's given me modern Windows features and speed on a clapped-out secondhand laptop, and I didn't have to use ANY of my (fairly extensive, if I do say so myself) existing Linux knowledge to get it working. Didn't have to use the command line once. Didn't have to know what a package manager was. An idiot with no computer knowledge at all could have done it.
In other words: Look out Microsoft, Ubuntu is now ready for your most valued clients!
Creative Hedgehog
La parte A se refiere solamente a las dos novelas estudiadas. La parte A debe ser preparada después de leer la primera mitad de la novela y contestar las siguientes preguntas: ¿te está gustando la novela/película o no, y por qué? No me gusta la novela. Las personajes que puedes gustar son superficiales, o hacen [...]
06/08/10 - SPN3730 diario: Pascual Duarte parte A
Hari's corner
Why being bi-lingual has its advantages
10/08/10 - Being bi-lingual has its advantages
Place of Stuff
Isn't this exciting? We're out of the tedium of Genesis (world created, man falls, many people live and die. Oh, and attempted forced buggery and a spot of incest). We're into Exodus now; the Bible has got going, that tricky first chapter is out of the way and the real action can start! When the [...]
03/08/10 - The Bible ? On The Waterfront
Advice From a Single Girl
I was giddy and hopeful when I first met Cary and spent a brief amount of time with him.
The week after that I was happily high on the idea of what could be, the possibility of getting to know someone interesting and intriguing, the wide open potential of what could be.
And I wanted to tell my friends all about him and what had, and hadn't happened, but I also wanted to keep it to myself, sealed safely in the happy bubble that was floating inside me. So I talked to some close friends about him, told them he lived in Vancouver and they, meaning well, told me quite firmly that they would not allow me to go through another long distance relationship. That I shouldn't even consider it.
My bubble had been burst.
I was completely deflated. Hurt. Let down.
I talked to C-Dawg, a sad tinge to the story now that I'd been told it could. . . should never work out.
"Vancouver?" she said, her voice somewhere between amused and incredulous. "That's not long distance! Get serious. Go for it."
And I let my bubble maybe start to re-inflate. Cautiously. Maybe just a little.
Then I talked to my friend about Cary. She said good things.
Maybe there was reason to be hopefully optimistic. Maybe it was ok to be a little girly and dreamy over what-ifs.
I went for a walk with S. We had life to catch up on.
Life including Cary and the story that still makes me smile.
She encouraged me to get his email, which I did, and then she went home and tried to find out what she could about him.
See, I'm not on Facebook. (No, really.) But S is, and in the small world way that Facebook seems to work, she found that Cary and she had a mutual friend and so she looked him up for me. (The modern background check.)
You can sometimes tell a lot about a person by what they put on their Facebook, she cautioned me. Sometimes.
How old is he?
Me: I don't know.
Is he a smoker?
Me: Um, I don't know? (God, I hope not)
Could he maybe be a little bit immature?
Me: I don't know. I suppose.
Well, he seems like a good guy. Cute. Interesting. I'd say he was my type, you know. (We laugh, we already know we share similar excellent taste in men.)
"I say go for it." She says, "just be aware that he's human. Not perfect."
I don't want to hear it.
Don't want to know the reality of him.
Find myself running away from all the what might have been's towards it'll never work what what I thinking's.
It's all or nothing. Perfect or awful. It'll work or it'll be a disaster.
And I realize that my bubble, the one that's been growing and floating inside me will burst on its own, without anyone's help if I get too far into imagining just how great Cary is, how great we'd be together, how perfectly perfect it all will be.
I'm Icarus. My friends don't want me flying too close to the sun.
But I like the feeling.
I like the soaring giddiness of how utterly fantastic this thing I've found will be.
Every single time I meet someone I like that feeling.
And I ride it higher and higher until I'm flapping my bare arms, feathers fallen into the sea and the crash is coming, the relationship splintering and I'm left staring at the brokenness wondering how on earth I could have been so wrong again.
The extremes are familiar. Addictive perhaps.
But I'm trying to learn to ride in the middle.
Safer. A shorter distance to fall.
A smaller bubble to burst.
Expectations that can be met and exceeded.
A safe, yet joyful and giddy flight. Wings intact.
03/09/10 - Icarus
Nation
  This was possibly the most ridiculous show I have seen in a long time and I can get Sky 1 I know ridiculous. It could be summed up in three sentences Do you know what's in your cereal? Want to? Read the label. Instead it went on for a hour about how evil the [...]
27/10/09 - Dispatches ? do you know what?s in your breakfast? (warning...
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The Offspring - She's Got Issues
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Submersible houseboat