A Man and his Penguin

I upgraded my PC to Dapper the other day. Once I turned off beagled, the system ran just as snappy as it did before. The new look is great and I really like the new versions of some of the programs.

I tried installing XGL and Compiz, but I couldn’t get it to work. I’ll try again later some time.

I’m working on a campaign headquarters website for "Tell Them About It". For more information, visit http://wiki.ubuntu.com/TellThemAboutIt

The only problem with Dapper is that the proprietry ATI drivers in the Dapper repository don’t get along well with Xorg 7. In fact, with some cards, they crash the system when you try to log out or shut down! (and reportedly there are crashes with some cards and starting X). I have an ATI Radeon Xpress 200, which seems to be one of the real problem cards.

ATI have released two new updates to their proprietry drivers. The first update doesn’t fix the problem. The second update DOES! I downloaded the drivers (from ATI) and installed them, and now I have 3D acceleration and a stable system. That’s great. If you have one of the affected cards, you should definately install the new driver. I’m also planning to find the community maintainer for the restricted modules and ask them to put the new driver into Ubuntu repositories. After all, it’s a bug that could potentially cause data loss!

I’d also like to urge you to download and listen to the UbuntuOS podcast: www.ubuntuos.com. It’s not very professionally done, but it’s quite entertaining and I’m hoping that they’ll publicise my campaign :-)  It makes me want to get going on an Ubuntu podcast of my own, but I don’t know anyone else who runs Ubuntu

I don’t even know if anyone reads this weblog (apart from that one time I got a comment about my Gene Pitney post). If you read my weblog, sorry for the lack of updates and please send me a message!

I’ve also halfway converted two people.

A friend of mine in India is having trouble with his pirated copy of Windows. I told him about Ubuntu, and he said "Linux is famous here". So when he’s finished backing up his Windows files, he’s going to download Ubuntu and give it a go. I’ve promised to help him configure it, which I may regret as he has a tendency to ask questions before trying to figure something out for himself

My friend Joe is back in Australia after a long time in the US. His fiance claims to be a nerd, so I’ve told her about Ubuntu and offered to let her use my Linux box for a while so she can get the feel of it and see if it’s something she would like to use.

So, that’s not bad!

Oh… I’ve e-mailed LG and told them that my DVD burner works with Ubuntu, and how to get it working really well. I got a kind of form letter back (which thanked me for my positive comments), but I hope they actually read more than my first sentence and will take the step of investigating product compatibility with Ubuntu further.

For anyone interested, here is my "choose your own Ubuntu compatibility letter" to send to hardware manufactuers:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TellThemAboutIt

Well, the truth is that I’ve been using Ubuntu Breezy on my new x86 PC for most of the time. I bought a video digitiser that only works on Windows (boo!) and an LG DVD burner that works on Linux.

Funny story about that: When I plugged it in, the computer took a long time to boot at certain disk-related parts. When I tried to mount the drive, it also took a long time before failing. So I turned on DMA. Funnily enough though, I accidentally turned on DMA on my existing CD-RW drive, and that fixed the problem! (turning on DMA on the DVD burner later actually made the startup slow again, though not as slow as before).

My Dad has been using the computer most of the time to digitise his friends’ videotapes, so I’ve sometimes been relegated to the iMac. I installed Enlightenment (E16) from repositories, and the Star Trek theme, so now it’s pretty cool!

I also tried installing the latest Xfce on my new computer, but I accidentally downloaded the installer for the old version. But still, it’s a pretty cool installer! It actually compiles the software in a user-friendly fashion. So now my computer is littered with Xfce stuff. My "Open as Root" Nautilus script now opens Thunar instead (because I compiled Thunar). Not what I really wanted, but still it’s quite good.

Am I getting better at compiling software? Probably! I failed to compile Enlightenment on the iMac, and I failed to compile Mono on the PC (yeah I know, they’re both in repositories) but I did manage to compile libexo and Thunar, and just now I’ve compiled Xmoto (which looks like a very promising Elastomania clone). I also compiled a small OpenGL program, Sable.

Oh, that reminds me: I found out that my ATI card is one of the ones supported by the proprietry driver! Yada yada yada, I’ve got acceleration now :-)  Plus, I’m learning more about the terminal. I installed Fish the other day (from an RPM) and that really rocks. And I’ve found out how to use the at and batch commands… look them up, they’re cool too!