Colin Charles Agenda

An Ubuntu-on-my-main-desktop virgin. Or more accurately, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 on a Dell Inspiron 640m laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB RAM, 120GB disk). hermione is no longer a Fedora Core machine, its all Ubuntu now.

Getting The Software
A few weeks ago, I’m pretty sure they offered PowerPC downloads that failed if you tried it for Feisty, but succeeded for Dapper. This week, they’ve cleaned up the download site, and I obviously chose 64-bit AMD and Intel computers (hello, thats what a Core 2 Duo is, right?).

The Ubuntu Download Page

First Impressions
Everything just works. Right out of the box, from the time the Live CD was inserted, to the install process, and the after-install process. It warned me of using Restricted Drivers for my wireless card (ipw3945), and that’s the only real violation I’ve got. Volume control buttons just work, as do brightness control.

After installation however, I got a 1024×768 screen, which displayed on 1440×900 looks kind of ugly. Solved easily via: sudo apt-get install 915resolution. Thats it, I didn’t have to do any more magic, beyond that.

Suspend/resume work just fine. The external display works (so far, I’ve only just used mirrored mode but there’s no reason to think stretching the desktop will not work – how GNOME copes is another matter).

Applications
I like that Firefox 2 is shipped by default. My configuration moved from Firefox 1.5 with no apparent problems. Ubuntu however has decided to disable the backspace key for going back in the history, which seemed to be quite annoying. This is apparently an upstream bug, however for tracking purposes its #60995. This is easily fix-able by opening a browser window, entering about:config and in the search bar looking for browser.backspace_action. Change the value from 1, to 0, and all will be well. Read more about browser.backspace_action if you’d like.

I think the mirror selection based on your country for apt is actually the most sensible solution, as opposed to yum’s mirrorlist. Why? Because contacting various mirrors is silly, some stop working, some don’t feed you correctly, and so forth. Worse, you might get assigned to a bogged down mirror. Ironically, au.archive.ubuntu.com is really mirror.optus.net (i.e. really fast for me) – yum has never once picked this for me automatically.

Playing DVDs? Need MP3 support so the Rhythmbox playlists load up? Their Restricted Formats page on the wiki is amazing. I never expect support out of the box (I wonder why some people rant that Ubuntu is evil as it ships these things by default) but I do expect support to be relatively easy to get. Go Medibuntu (this is the Livna of Ubuntu).

Thoughts For Improvement
Definitely, the migration assistant shouldn’t only attempt to migrate you from Windows. Its much easier doing a migration from /home/username on an existing Linux or Unix install. Sure, its probably not the mass market doing migrations from one distribution to another, but I see it as quite possible that more and more folk move to Ubuntu for ease of use, and the “just works” mentality.

A personal preference is that I don’t like the Human theme. The color scheme seems to be all wrong. Clearlooks is much nicer on the eyes, and I’ve found a Flickr photo that I took to be more interesting on my background (first time I’ve used the image, might I add). Fedora’s backgrounds are really, so much nicer. Canonical is hiring a UI Developer.

Note: This was supposed to be posted a couple of weeks back… It for some reason sat in my ScribeFire (formerly Performancing) notes pile.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, linux, feisty fawn, migration, ui, medibuntu

Liferea 1.2.10 actually rocks. It does duplicate detection in posts, and makes my feed reading life, a lot easier.

Liferea Duplicate Feed Detection at work

It also supports bookmarking with del.icio.us, which is nifty. It feels a lot faster than the previous version. It had some internal database change and did the honorable thing and keep a backup of the old one, in case I was planning on rolling back.

All my technical related feeds have been imported into Liferea, and I’m a happy camper. In my idea of making NetNewsWire even more useless to me, I’ve moved all photographic related blog reading to Google Reader.

Now, thats a nice piece of software. With access to the Internet, I can read my feeds and have them always “synced” – i.e. I’m never going to have to read an entry twice, or anything of that sort. The only caveat is that I need to actually be online.

So while it’s handy to read Google Reader feeds while I’m sitting in a shop waiting for my take-out, its also pretty darn expensive. I’m paying something like $4.95 for less than 5MB of traffic per month I think (or maybe its 10MB), with Optus.

Does there exist software to read Google Reader offline (Linux preferred, Mac OS X is OK, Windows tolerated)? Do Series 60 Nokia phones have such ability? I ask because soon I’ll not only have the N73, but an E61i (which has WiFi). If only Liferea read/synced with Google Reader, then I can move all my feeds to a cool backend.

Technorati Tags: liferea, google reader, series 60, rss, feeds