Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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Ubuntu
Last week I installed the latest release of Ubuntu Linux (nicknamed “Edgy Eft”, don’t ask) on my dinky laptop and I have to say I’m really rather impressed.
I’m not entitled to claim the rank of full-on Linux geek yet, but I do have to look after a couple of Debian-based servers for the Kittenwar empire, so I know a fair amount of the basic theory and practice of running Linux systems. All the hairy sysadmin stuff is handled by the hosting company though, I’m not really in charge. The stuff I do on those servers is just shell commands and PHP-MySQL web scripting, there’s no desktop stuff. At home we have an old Windows XP box for music and DVDs, and an OS X iBook which pretty much looks after itself. All my day-job work requires is basic MS Office skills. So I don’t actually need to mess about with Linux desktop stuff; I just do it for fun, really.I have played with Ubuntu before, and quite liked it, but I lost that install when I killed the hard disk by dropping the computer in question on the floor. I’ve also installed several iterations and variations of Debian on assorted laptops and old desktops, which is much more entertaining, if your idea of entertainment is spending every evening for two weeks trying to figure out how to get your wifi connetion working with WPA.
As it happens, WPA wireless was the one of the few things that didn’t work straight off with this install of Edgy. The only other major piece of initial non-functionality was the pre-broken Intel integrated graphics widescreen resolution, which is easily fixed by installing 915resolution (from the “universe” repository). It took me a couple of days and a lot of digging to figure out how to get wireless WPA running under Network Manager. Force of habit from all those Debian installs had me editing configurations all over the place, when what I was actually supposed to do was leave the text files alone and let the little applet handle it all for me instead. Once I got rid of all the carefully honed configuration tricks I’ve taught myself over the past few years, it all worked fine. Suspiciously smoothly in fact. I feel like I should be reading manpages and digging around in /usr/share/doc/ a lot more than I am.
Not everything works, I hasten to add; that would be weird. The SD/MMC reader is just a fancy ventilation slot as far as Linux is concerned. Some of the multimedia codecs completely ignore the volume control, but I can probably sort that out. As usual, I can’t view some websites because their authors are drooling, slobbering morons who insist that I need Flash-9-on-Windows-or-better to use the internet. The release name is stupid. And I ditched the default mail client, Evolution, for Thunderbird as soon as I realised it wanted me to use horrible, horrible HTML email. But almost everything else seems to be quite happy and admirably well configured, I now have access to everything I need for developing websites right on my laptop, and it was really quite painless getting to this state.
So far, Edgy Eft has impressed me as a desktop OS, and Ubuntu seems to be heading in the right direction to become something that might one day be appealing for relatively normal people.
