xenoveritas.org

Ubuntu 8.04 is out!

I've been using it for a while on my work Linux computer and my home Linux laptop. The work machine's been running basically flawlessly. The laptop had some issues with the wireless adapter, but thankfully that has been resolved.

On the laptop side, 3D graphics effects are now supported. I now have Compiz running on both machines, which is kind of cool. (And since I've mucked with the window closing animations, closing windows is much more exciting than it used to be. Burn and Beam Up are cool. Uh, anyway.)

KDE4 has recently released a Windows version of KDE which allows many popular KDE applications like Konqueror under Windows.

Well, sort of.

The installation process is still a bit sketchy. My first attempt to use the graphical installer failed, because I was behind a firewall and the attempt to use Firefox's settings failed. (It does need to be noted that I use a PAC script for settings, so if using Firefox settings worked for someone else, that could be why.)

I recently got a new laptop which I've installed Ubuntu to. It's working wonderfully, better than I was afraid it would. Unfortunately it won't run Compiz on the graphics chipset that was included (some Intel integrated thing) but that's hardly a big deal.

In any case, I figured I'd use the Ubuntu Firefox Addon installer to install the mouse gesture addon.

It, uh, didn't work.

It did install Thunderbird though.

Unfortunately it didn't actually install the mouse gestures addon into either Firefox or Thunderbird.

I think it might need some more work.

The beta of Ubuntu's next release, 7.10 (codename Gutsy Gibbon) is available for download!

People who already have Ubuntu 7.04 installed (dunno about earlier versions) can upgrade from the console using the following command:

update-manager -d

For a list of what's planned for this release, check out the Launchpad.

Probably the biggest change is the new version of GNOME.

Update: The logout icon is now a Cactuar?

For those of you who aren't programmers or nerd, "\a" is the string commonly used to represent the "alarm character" is C-style programming languages. It makes the computer beep.

Problem: Almost all computers don't use the sound card to beep, they use a special dedicated speaker. (Why? Diagnostic reasons, many computers will use special beep sequences to indicate an error that prevents them from displaying graphics. Such errors would also exclude the sound card.)

So why is this a problem? Well, because the beep is coming from a special speaker dedicated to making annoying beeps, it completely and totally ignores your volume settings.

Debian defaulted to GNOME when it installed, so I've been using GNOME for no good reason, although I've now got a good list of reasons never to recommend GNOME to anyone but the most masochistic.

I want to do the incredibly complicated task of "open file in a text editor and not a program that can't actually handle it."

Right Click on the file, try "Open With." Oops, the option I want (text editor) is listed twice. And neither work. Of course. So how do I remove these broken options?

Quick trip to Help, Contents. Nothing happens.

Hit F1. Nothing happens.

Hit F1 a bunch more. Nothing happens.

Well, at least I'm not insane. It's bug #352001.

With absolutely NO INDICATION if they plan on fixing it, of course.

I found this article to be fairly helpful when it came to installing Sun's JRE under Debian Linux.

However, there was one step that I needed to add that was missing:

apt-get remove java-gcj-compat

Without that step, the GCJ Java compatibility scripts remained, conflicting with Sun's Java. Since that package was installed by default with my Debian Testing install, I expect other people will run into the same problem.

So I recently switched my work laptop over to Linux, because Windows XP was running incredibly slowly. Now I know that the usual cause of "Windows XP is running incredibly slowly" is simply "spyware" but in this case, it's "corporate required spyware" (Norton Antivirus, asset tracking software, etc.). It's slowing the thing to a freaking crawl.

It turns out that there's an official way you can get out of having to run the asset software and all that other corporate software: run Linux. (This also gets you out of having a supported PC, but I can cope.)

So I installed Debian Testing on it. And the laptop boots much, much faster now. (We're talking a good two minutes to load everything versus something like 20 minutes under Windows. Not kidding.) It runs faster. About the only thing slower is that, for some reason, GNOME feels slower than Windows. (KDE too, but Debian defaulted to GNOME, and I haven't decided to change it yet. Eclipse and Firefox both use GTK+, so, I'm basically just using GNOME software anyway.) But it's really not that big a deal, because minor things like compiling and running the software are faster.

I'm trying to edit my keyboard layout, so I go through the options, and discover the following:

So, um, which of those several options marked "default" is actually the default?!