Skin of Stars

Its got to that time of the month where I have to reinstall my operating system. I can’t blame the system, it is each and every time, without fail, my fault. I can’t help but keep tinkering and playing with them till they fail on me. I remember when I first started playing with the things I would have to reinstall before I’d even finished the first install! At least now here are often months between.

I thought this time I might get out of my comfort zone for a bit. I decided to install the new fedora 8. I will be totally honest now and admit that it lasted on my machine for two days before I switched back to ubuntu. The problem wasn’t with fedora per say, I could see almost immediately that this was a far more stable operating system with many of the features I like built in straight out the box. It clearly benefits from the good breeding of Red Hat. The problem I have is that I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination and fedora is clearly built for people who have some idea what they are doing. From what I found there seemed to be very little documentation for novices and to be honest I don’t have the time for that sort of learning curve.

So here is what seems to have happened. I have acquired the same disinterest in learning a new operating system that my Windows using counterparts have always had. I hope this doesn’t stick.

Ubuntu coming to a Tesco near you.

http://linkpot.net/kidnap/
http://linkpot.net/chastened/

For one of my school projects I have to write programs for Microsoft (R) Windows (TM). I know that this makes sense, lets be honest its in most peoples homes. The problem I have is that I didn’t have it in my home. I’ve been using Ubuntu (a linux thing) on all my machines for more than six months now and have barely touched anything with Windows since. So, I knew that a new version of Ubuntu was coming out on Thursday so yesterday I decided to wipe my laptop and replace it with Windows XP in order to make school a little easier (I’ll also get more BBC content, as a bonus). And here is where the problems started…

Correct drivers were not included. Why is this something the the OSS boys do so well with so little help yet a company with so much money for research do so badly? I mean, the drivers were available on the internet, I just couldn’t get on the internet to find them because the first set of drivers I needed were network drivers! Even when I used other machines I found the documentation was atrocious. I got that annoyed with it I had to give my computer to someone else to fix before I started beating it.

I’m not saying life’s a beach as soon as you go open source, infact its far from it. To be honest, my other problems were things that I would have just been used to before. Things like programs organised by manufacturer rather than what they do. Maybe this is why its hard to go back, you get used to something and you’re happy. Its like trying to revive an old relationship I guess, lets be honest, you broke up for a reason.

So in a couple of days Windows will be partitioned off and placed in a back corner of my machine. I’m not going to completely delete it this time but I’m afraid to say I can never embrace it again.

I doubt many of you will have heard of Compiz or its one time rival Beryl. These are add-ons for Linux desktops which, though they have their advantages for making your computer more productive, are very much fancy eye-candy. Basically, whenever my friends ask why I use nix I show them some Compiz features, they then exclaim how cool they are and ask how to make their computer do that. They can’t of course because they use archaic operating systems.

Anyway, I digress. Compiz is a window composting manager project (you’ll see what I mean when you watch the film) which had some infighting, a common thing in open source communities where everyone has the right to say their piece. A group split to go form the Beryl project. Now, though Beryl was often the more exciting project, I preferred Compiz for its stability.

Since then the two groups have decided to re-merge, thus pooling their knowledge and avoiding doubling their work. I’ll admit that I was skeptical about what the result would be, would Compiz stop being stable? Would Beryl become less exciting? The following video shows that Compiz Fusion (as the joint project is now known) has certainly become even more exciting than Beryl was alone. I’m now looking forward to installing it to see if its still as stable, even on my cheap integrated graphics card.

Its taken long enough but I am finally back on the net. I thought that with all this high-speed world we were living in the internet wouldn’t have take the better part of a month to sort out. First its problems with how long since you’ve had your phone line, then its that the previous people living here were with another company (hold on, I’m sure I set up a new line!?), then you have to wait for engineers, then you have to wait longer because of floods! All very painful.

A few weeks ago we had our interband football tournament in Dane Park. We’ve been doing it for the past seven years (here is a link to last years football post). I managed to get to the final this year but alas we were beaten by younger, fitter, chavs. Ah well. Just like to say a public thanks to all the lads who helped me organise the event. I’d also like to say a public shame on all those who left litter at the end, not cool.

I was intending to do a rebuke to Tony’s comments on my last blog post, but the moment is somewhat lost. He is right, Linux isn’t the most prevalent desktop system. It is worth noting though that it is by no means a backwater system, for example, Blogger runs on Linux. So its interesting that he was using said system to say that no-one uses it.

Well, its a nice day so I’ll leave you all to it.

I’m appalled at a recent BBC decision to release its new online watch again service to Windows only. The problem for me is that I love the BBC normally and I want to consume their content but they always make it so hard for me. I don’t like to consider myself anti-Microsoft but I don’t want to use their software which means that I’m now pretty much stuck with the BBC’s text only content. I’m afraid I’m going to be reduced to just listening to a bit of radio 4 when I’m near a radio. If I have already paid my license fee then why should I also have to buy software from an American company to watch it?