2005-12-15
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox
annotea ++?
Read more at www.google.com/tools/fi...
2005-12-11
ubuntu - flavor of the month
Some notes on ubuntu-5.10 on an amd64 box. Ubuntu claims to be a "Linux for Human Beings" but these human beings better know some trivia:
- radeon vs ati - ubuntu chose to set X driver as ati but it should've been radeon. needless to say you must edit xorg.conf. i'll bet we will have to edit xorg.conf by hand until 2038.
- don't bother with 64-bit install: you'd still need to create chroot or something for 32-bit environment. annoying.
- you have to learn debian package management system --- yeah, ubuntu has a gui for that but it doesn't find things like gcc or libraries.
- ubuntu nags you about updates that lists new kernel versions, the latest sudo, this and that libraries - why bother ordinary human beings about the latest sudo or other gibberish like libmysqlclient14?
- lots of licensing issues force you to download & install flash and java by hand.
- dvd barely works after installing libdvdcss or some such; there are many players available but they all have crappy ui and none plays region coded dvd (vlc on mac could do it fine but not on ubuntu).
- system monitor is dumb (even when zip chews cpu, it shows 0% in the ps widget while showing maxed out graph).
- gnome desktop -- at least it's not KDE, otherwise just same old boring.
- In the middle of scp Ubuntu takes out the route in use from kernel ip route table! It turns out traceroute is not even installed.
- for gcc and the ilk: sudo apt-get install build-essential.
- groff is half-installed only with man macros.
