A Man and his Penguin

From what I hear, it’s going to be really good.

1. Say goodbye to big, heavy Nautilus; say goodbye to ridiculously limited Rox-Filer. Say hello to Thunar - which seems to look like a lightweight clone of Nautilus.

2. No more manual mounting or installing gnome-volume-manager - Xubuntu now has an automounter.

3. Xu appears to have better sound controls.

Man am I looking forward to putting it onto my iMac. I’d probably never use it, but still it would be fun!

Seems I selected the wrong thing during the install, so now my system clock is wrong. I can’t remember how I fixed it on the Mac. I’m a bit of a numbnuts.

As for my Mac, I’m wondering whether to upgrade it to Dapper Xubuntu. Since it shan’t get much use, the frustrating things I found on Breezy Xu wouldn’t be too bad; assuming those frustrating elements haven’t been fixed (I hear wonderful things about Xfce 4).

Also, is being able to put a 5 second gap between audio tracks REALLY too much to ask of Gnome? It’s halfway through my broadband billing month and I’m already over halfway through my download allowance, so I don’t really want to download 500 megs worth of KDE stuff and K3B! I also don’t like the thought of burning from the command line, although I did do it this once. I’ve heard that iTunes runs on WINE; seems it can’t access an iPod, but maybe it can burn CDs?

Final thing: I want to create my own distro based on Dynebolic. My reasoning is simple: Dynebolic is easy to use and kinda cool looking, it already has many of the programs I’d want on my distro, there’s a guide in Linux Format about how to customise it. The reason why I want my own distro is so I can send copies to my friends; they’d be more likely to run something that I claimed to create. Then I might be able to get them to use Ubuntu

Speaking of Ubuntu, I still cannot BELIEVE how much faster it runs on this computer than Windows. Windows is no speed slouch really; it transcodes MP3s to WMAs in about 14 seconds!

I’ve been converting MP3s to WMAs so my mother and father can put lots more music onto their MP3 players. While trying to do so, I made a couple of shocking discoveries:

1. Windows Media Player only rips CDs, it doesn’t convert files from your hard disk.
2. There is no way to get Windows Media Encoder to batch encode WITHOUT using the command line! (obviously, this is what I did)
3. The iTunes Music Store has Mylene Farmer albums! (actually, I discovered this AFTER converting the WMAs :-)   )

I bought an iTunes Music Card, but I’ll wait a little while before downloading one of Mylene’s albums; I don’t want to run out of bandwidth at a crucial time. At the end of the billing month I’ll probably dist-upgrade to Dapper Flight 7, then a week later I’ll be able to just download the updated packages.

Well… I must change the description of my blog. I’ve now got a PC, so that will be used for most of my Ubuntu work. It also runs Windows, but I really dislike Windows.

Not for any MS-bashing reasons; not for any software ideological reasons; but simply for how difficult things are in Windows. People talk about KDE having an overload of settings, but Windows must be worse. Every dialog box has a "Setup" button which opens a new control panel, which has a "Properties" button which opens a new window, which contains an "Advanced" button. Also, this being the display model used at the computer store, Windows definately runs much slower than Ubuntu.

When setting up my broadband ADSL connection (which runs through my Ethernet port), Windows kept wanting to "dial" it! In order to get the thing to work, I had to tell Windows to set up a HOME NETWORK. Think about it: My broadband only works if Windows thinks I’m connected to a network. Crazy.

Setting up Ubuntu was a bit less fun than I remembered. Running the Live CD was a little easier than on the Mac, considering I didn’t know exactly what settings to use; but "vesa" works fine for the moment. I’m hoping to get the ATI card running before too long. I was *very* cautious with the resizing of the NTFS partition, but after a few looks at the inbuilt help and the guided partitioner I became satisfied that it would only resize and not destroy the NTFS partition. My computer didn’t come with a "rescue" CD, damnation.

Also, after restarting and having Ubuntu install the remaining packages, I was horrified to notice that it was loading stuff through my Internet connection! I switched off the modem… then near the end of the install it told me that parts of the install had failed, then dropped me to a command-line prompt. Fortunately, a quick "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" fixed the problem.

I also had to change the xorg.conf file to use the vesa driver in order to get the xserver started. Also, it only started up after another restart.

The moral of the story: If Ubuntu starts loading packages through your network connection, LET IT. It’s not going to download the whole thing, I assure you.

Now I’m looking forward to trying out some new distros. Which reminds me: How do you change the date and time on this thing?