Finally moved my main working machine to Kubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”. Yeah, late a bit, but it is my everyday working environment so I have to take these upgrades very seriously to not put my work into mess even for a day. Fortunately, no bad things were happened and in a lucky weekend I got Kubuntu 8.04 installed with all software I needed.
The holiday season is going on and it’s a time to have all sorts of fun. Watching movies and cartoons is not the last item in our family agenda, so I prepared to that with all power of my homebred IT infrastructure.
I should say I hate disks. They are taking a lot of space, cluttering all around, getting scratched and getting lost sometimes. I am too lazy to stand up and find a CD/DVD on a shelf just to get a movie or a song. I already got all my music collection in the computer as MP3 files and used to grab every new audio CD immediately. I’d like to do the same with DVD movies – rip them from the disks, convert them to something like MPEG4 and provide shared access to the media collection in our home network.
Well, there is Gutsy Gibbon on the streets and every Feisty user perhaps already have asked himself a crucial question – to upgrade or not to upgrade?
My house is in the area where the best internet is wireless. My main channel is a satellite broadband, it’s fast enough (up to 4 Mbps) and cheap. In general, I like it. The only problem is that it is one-way downlink – it needs an outgoing channel for requests tunneling and uploads.
So far, it was GPRS. Very slow, very expensive and unstable. It’s not a secret that GPRS internet traffic has lowest priority in GSM networks. So, sometimes it shuts down because of voice traffic overload. I was annoyed and was looking for an alternative.
I’m feeling diggy a bit, because my desktop is shaking and spinning now. I’m trying Beryl – a 3D desktop and window manager for Linux.
Changing OS is like moving to a new home – it is empty and clean and looks not so fond and comfortable as your old flat. But, bit by bit, it looks inhabited more and more – you’re placing a furniture, sticking a wallpaper by your own taste and making the home full of your belongings, gadgets and knick-knacks.
The difference between good and not-so-good Linux distribution is how often you have to keep a hammer and file in your hands while making the system good for living. In this sense, Ubuntu is a good system.
… is really a snap. Indeed, Feisty Fawn was my easiest Linux installation – about half an hour from disk partitioning to getting into a working system. All my hardware have been recognized and installed correctly – even such exotic pieces like DVB-card. This device is a key part of my networking subsystem and a source of headache with building and configuring custom kernel. It was a good surprise to see it working out of the box.
Contents of the Desktop CD is not too rich but enough as a basic kit for the most of home/office tasks. Now I am in the process of installing all extra stuff I need and moving all my environment from old (Fedora) installation. So, my system is dual-booted until this process is done.
Link: “ESR: ‘Fedora… you blew it’” (LinuxWatch).
Eric’s criticism concerning Red Hat/Fedora is 100% true. It is what I, Fedora Core unlucky user, may confirm. I installed FC-4 on my shine new box in 2005, looking for simplicity and manageability after almost 3 years of struggling with Gentoo’s portages. Before I was on few Red Hats and Mandrakes so RPM-based package management was quite familiar for me with all its problems and “dependency hell” nightmares. But I hoped that for these years the things were improved and there was a lot of talking about yum, so I believed my life on my new machine and a system from respected Red Hat brand would be easy as it was never before.
SourceKibitzer team let me know that my OSS projects (Memoranda and Jacinth) had been analyzed by their web tool and the reports are available.
Remember this day: 13th of November 2006 Sun is releasing Java under the Gnu General Public License (GPL) version 2. I think all Java/OSS developers and advocates must have a drink for that today.
Sun believes deeply in creating communities and sharing innovations and technologies to foster more participation. Today in a historic move, Sun is opening the door to greater innovation by open sourcing key Java implementations—Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE)—under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), the same license as GNU/Linux.
