Walk Alone

I’m happy happy happy!

The hardware guy has returned my video card and my Gladiator DVD! My system is complete! I ‘ve to look into installing some nvidia thingy to get a better look at the card’s capabilities.

As for the scheduled upgrade, just like from 7.04 to 7.10, 7.10 to 8.04 has gone smoothly. In case you are wondering why I had to do a clean install for 7.04: I assembled my current machine in late March 2007 - 7.04 was just in time to be the first OS to be loaded on to this machine.

The upgrade pulled 463 MB from the net in spite of having the alternate CD at its disposal. I ran the update-upgrade sequence a couple of more times to get the third party repos up to the mark.

No major surprises except for XMMS, which is replaced by Audacious. And it may be the novelty of the upgrade, but things look even more glossy than in Ubuntu 7.10.

Life is good.

The best version of Ubuntu ever is coming out; right on schedule on 24th April.

This time around, I ‘m in two minds - go for GNOME or go for KDE, specifically, KDE 4.  The facts that KDE 4  is still  not complete and that the only clean way to go from GNOME to KDE is to reformat are keeping me in the GNOME camp for now. No time to experiment. No time to backup data and restore.

An OS upgrade is also the time when I take a good, hard look at my machine and decide on any upgrades to the hardware. I have added a 250 GB SATA hard disk (Western Digital) and a new keyboard to my machine in honor of the Hardy Heron. I had other reasons too - I sorely needed the storage space. As for the keyboard, the one connected to my dad’s machine was getting clunky. You would have to apply about as much force as you would put on a circuit breaker to switch it on. It took the fun out of using the PC. So my comfy Logitech keyboard goes to my dad, while I got a Samsung Pleomax. While it doesn’t have the brand, it had a compact form factor and smooth, consistent tactile feedback.

The third thing I bought - a USB Bluetooth dongle - was a stillborn. It didn’t even get detected. A pity, really. The stores offer you no other brand than the el cheapo Chinese one. This was my second attempt, incidentally, to get a useful Bluetooth experience. The first dongle petered out in a couple of weeks… So now, I ‘m a huge fan of the USB cable. It just works!

In other news, I tried Wammu to backup my SE z550i. It did read the contacts and messages correctly, but was not able to restore the messages from backups (I did not attempt the contacts). I filed a bug - it seems to be a copy of an existing one. Let’s see if I can ever get my messages back on to the phone.

My lean and mean rig is still incomplete. Yes, one year after I paid money for it and got it delivered, I still haven’t received the NVIDIA GeForce 7100 graphics card. It went kaput one week after delivery and has been in “repair” ever since. I have given up hope of ever seeing it again. To add insult to injury, the computer guy (who has also failed to return my original DVD of Gladiator - see a pattern here?) calls me frequently for “Linux advice”. Call me a sucker for … whatever; but the times I have asked him about it, I was promised it would be delivered in a week. Lesson has been learnt.

This new Samsung keyboard has a few buttons I need to explore - power, sleep, wake, turbo and the Win keys. I should be able to map them to do something useful.

No, really. The upgrade was as routine as brushing teeth.

Except I cannot stress enough how important having a good net connection has become for Linux installs. By good, I mean reliability. It won’t matter if its going to take ten hours, as long as after ten hours, the stuff will be downloaded and ready for action.

One reason is, of course, the way software is installed on Ubuntu (or Fedora, for that matter). You configure your system to use trusted repositories available on the net. These provide a list of the packages on offer. With the help of capable tools like apt and yum, you are spared dependency hell and provided with clean rollbacks. Of course, this means if you have an unreliable connection you have to turn to tools like apt-on-cd.

The other reason is updates. Updates on Linux are reassuringly regular. They range from a few kilobytes to whatever is the largest package you have installed. Sometimes, updates are available for a bunch of packages. Then, we need to download around 100 MB or so! Sure, we can choose to skip the updates, but then installing new software becomes a pain - outdated packages and so on. Updating is better, and fun.

Finally, there’s the dist-upgrade. When I popped in the alternate CD, it flashed a warning about some incompatible packages (from the universe repository, I believe) and aborted. On the third attempt, I connected to the net. It downloaded a hefty 434 MB! And it was worth every byte.

And of course, mailing lists, forums, wikis and IRC - all need a net connection!

On the surface, 7.10 is almost same as 7.04 for me. I don’t need to go ‘Wow!’, so no wobbly windows and cube desktops for me. The changes are subtle. Like sharper artwork on the GUI widgets. One big change is Audacity. Its moved on from the clunky “old” GTK look and now is on par with the rest of Ubuntu applications. GIMP is also updated, I think.

Thunderbird, long held back in 7.04, is now at 2.0.0.x. And it looks great! Wonder why it wasn’t showing up as an upgrade in 7.04.

Hardware? 100% perfect detection!

One of my few remaining friends, Bhise, bought an Acer 4710z. He installed Fedora 7 on it - wiping the stupid Linpus that came on it. Everything works except for the integrated webcam and microphone. And I believe he’s steadily bringing those issues to a close too.

But then well, for every “Linux worked for me”, we have a “Linux didn’t even boot on my machine”. Guess we still have work to do.