Fitting the battle of life

This is a bit late, and I apologise. I apologise also for the lack of photos - there’s a very good reason I forgot to take more, and it’s to do with the beer, and all the kind kind folks (Daviey, Popey, Kirrus and a couple of others) who bought me beer. In addition to the few I got myself.

(There is one photograph that has been censored and is not available to view. The person responsible knows who he is!)

Anyway - the night was great, the people friendly and the cake delicious. Now, if only I could remember more of what happened, that would be awesome! It’s a shame Popey and Daviey were not in a, er, able state to record any interviews for the podcast, but I’m sure it’s probably best they didn’t. The Canonical peeps were all really good fun to chat to, and the rest of the community I met (including Wubi guy, who has made it a lot easier for Windows-types to try Ubuntu out), were all fantastic.

Bring on Intrepid Ibex and more Belgian beers!

You know, I’ve had enough of Ubuntu. I realised today that I feel guilty.

Even as a student, I’m expected to get things on cheap. Sainsburys basics food, cheap pints at the Union, that kind of thing. But the thing is, however cheap we students get, we never sink so low as to take something for free. It’s an unwritten rule: if it’s free, it’s wrong. You’re probably stealing. And stealing’s a Bad Thing, trademark.  (To say nothing of the patent issue…)

Ubuntu may looks shiny and be fully functional. But a Jaguar is shiny and fully functional as well. Don’t see me just taking one of those without paying for it, do you?

No, Ubuntu is making me feel guilty. I want cheap computing, not stolen computing. Today I am going to back up all my documents (taking care to re-save all my odt files back into doc format), find my old XP install disk, and blast Ubuntu off my computer. Mark today in your diaries: it’s when I start going clean.

jerichokb, 1/4/08

Well, the pwn to own contest has come to an end, and after the early exit of the MacBook Air, the Vista laptop was the second to go, leaving the Ubuntu machine still standing at the end.

It’s not a particularly scientific contest - I’m sure the Air went first because it was a more desirable prize than the Vista laptop, but the fact that the Ubuntu machine ‘won’ doesn’t surprise me, and probably doesn’t surprise anyone else either. The Mac succumbed to a flaw in Safari, and the Vista machine apparently a flaw in Adobe’s flash player.

There are security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu - or there would never be security updates - but for the moment, we’re safe.

Following up from my first impressions, I’m now on beta 3 (which comes as default in the Hardy beta), and noticing a few more features I’m really impressed with.

First up is better download management. It was good to begin with, but there’s now a quick-look indicator in the status bar so you can keep track of how everything’s going without bringing up the download window:

The new download window itself has been revamped, but I don’t like having to right-click to clear the list - having a separate button was much more intuitive. I suppose that with the ’search’ box as well, the developers were aiming for a google-esque archiving everything you’ve ever downloaded feature, but it doesn’t really float my boat.

It may just be the slightly tweaked Hardy icon set, but I’ve noticed some tiny icon changes, specifically dealing with rss feed icons, which look slicker if a little bigger to my eye (can’t compare as I’m on a clean install of Hardy). Shots of both the address bar and live bookmark icons:

Finally, the new Add-ons dialogue is a great idea, letting you search for extensions without opening up another tab, but in my first test didn’t perform that well. Still, it’s a neat feature to have:

That’s about it for now, will do another update when it moves out of beta.

Ubuntu brainstorm mentioned (in passing, I must admit) in the Guardian Technology section, in the first paragraph of this article, which describes Starbucks’ new website along the same lines as Brainstorm and Dell’s IdeaStorm.

It always makes me smile when Ubuntu gets mentioned in the news, even if it’s a tiny little aside as in this case. It just helps get the name out, I suppose.

Well, just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 and my initial thoughts were very good: liked the new login screen, and the new default wallpaper (my usual wallpaper no longer ‘zooms’ as well as it did - in gutsy in zoomed in on the centre of the photo, now it zooms on the top, which in this case is just sky).

However, graphics is a little disappointing - in gutsy I was doing just fine, but Hardy defaulted to ‘None’ in desktop effects. Changing it prompted an install of fglrx or whatever it is, and now a restart. This, of course, makes little sense. Why would an upgrade downgrade my experience? Oh, wait. Vista. Still, using Ubuntu this is a little annoying.

Of course, nothing actually broke - at least not yet - so overall I’m quite happy. We’ll see what happens to my graphics once I restart.

Dear all,

I regret to announce the end of the known universe. A bug has been found whereby simple mathematics is severely broken. Please stop having children, receiving medical care and, indeed, breathing; once everyone’s finished with Universe 0.8b we can fix this bug and release a new version, tentatively universe 0.8.1a.

Please return all academic qualifications in mathematics, physics et al to be reprocessed. Once we have rectified this mistake and reconciled existing theorems, calculations and assumptions with the consequences of this discovery you will be able to re-take these qualifications.

Sincere apologies.

That’s the way, uhuh, uhuh, I like it…two seconds to find my old .theme folder backed up on external hard drive (from before the reinstall), half a second to copy it all over, two seconds to change theme in System>Preferences>Appearance. How to get your desktop looking great in under five seconds. Sorted. Black-white icons, black window borders, darkilouche controls and a lovely nasa wallpaper.

I think it’s quite a good combination, certainly better than the default. I also have my panels trimmed to 23 pixels instead of 24 (it makes a difference! honest!), and the mouse pointers changed to whiteglass. I love customisation :)

As you may know, I reinstalled Ubuntu the other day, and quickly set about updating and reinstalling things. My first installation was a big job of mplayer, mozilla-mplayer, irssi, vlc, exaile, those kind of programs to get functionality back to what it was. So I fired up exaile to play some music, and it froze. Greyed out, had to force quit. Bugger.

I tried it in rhythmbox and only then realised it was an mp3. And I hadn’t installed restricted extras…

Note to self: make a comprehensive checklist of post-reinstall chores for next time.

That’s it. I’ve blitzed my Windows partition. I now run an Ubuntu-only system, and once I’ve finished installing the 196 updates (!) I’ll start getting my newly installed OS back to how I like it.

I don’t think I missed anything in my pre-blitz back-up - I even remembered to back up my Evolution settings, so I didn’t need to go through the pain of setting up e-mail accounts.  The only thing I’ve forgotten is my log-in details for the AIM account I use for talking on rare occasion to one person, so I’ll have to trawl through my email trying to find the relevant information.

The first time I tried to install, the installer hung at 90% for about 15 minutes (while I cooked myself a celebratory fry-up!) - the clock had stopped, no windows were responding but the mouse worked. So, very hesitantly, I hard-rebooted and tried again, but this time it was flawless.

Needless to say, I am happy to be Windows-free.