Jaunty

YESS!!!!! The new Ubuntu Jaunty is on my computer (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, which is officially alpha, erm, 6, right now). Hey there are a few bugs but it's an alpha, it's actually much more stable than the alpha of Gutsy or even Hardy was. Although the name 'Hardy' really does suit that particular LTS release of Ubuntu. It is hardy to the most foolish of people, and is crash-able by only the people who want to crash it, like me. I kernel panicked it once, but only by deleting some major system file in the /boot folder! But the alpha of hardy? That was a different story: 1) open a gtk dialog. 2) click on the desktop. 3) click on the gtk dialog. 4) there is no 4. Reset button please. That's just one particularly awful bug I found in hardy alpha though.

Anyway, back to the original topic. Jaunty. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Ubuntu kinda, but lately the development has seemed to have, erm....hit something hard, and...fell over shall we say? yes there are things here and there like, um, new popups (those are a real improvement and kick windows's ass on that front btw), plus a new computer 'janitor' that cleans up junk on your computer. And it uses the ext4 file system, of course, which reduces fsck times by about a magnitude of 25 (if I got my estimates right, that is). But apart from things like that, things the general user wouldn't even notice if he/she wasn't a geek, things really do seem to have hit a plateau on the development front. I really haven't noticed many new features, so if it continues this trend I might consider switching to something with a faster development cycle. The trouble with them is that, with that there tends to be the fact that it's still quite a new and undeveloped distro, like gOS for instance (which is based on Ubuntu I believe).

On the KDE side, things are looking bad. Not bad, worse than that...erm...you can think of any word and it won't be quite bad enough to describe the badness of KDE4. It is UNUSABLE. UNUSABLE. Can't use it. I have reinstalled KDE4 three times, reinstalled my system once, then reinstalled KDE4 another time, and each time it has the same fault: it just won't work. I try launching a program and it freezes. why couldn't they stick with KDE3.5 for $&%@ sake? It worked and it was damn good. Sorry KDE guys, but I'ma stick with GNOME for the time being. KDE sucks big time.

On the windows side, things start to be getting better, bit by bit, slowly but surely recovering from the miserable days of Vista, the second worse windows distro (actually, make that the worst. I'd take win95 over vista any day :P). Yes, low-IQ person, I'm talking about windows 7 if you're wondering. I've installed the Beta of it on my machine and...well...things are at least a bit better than Vista. It's supposed to be faster than vista, haven't noticed that yet but I haven't been doing anything intensive on it apart from a few games of GRID (and that's not all that intensive even on max settings). From what I've seen of it, I wouldn't pick it over XP x64 though (which I use right now for anything that needs Windows).

Oh btw I had some hardware additions to my computer:
New harddisk. 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1. One Windows XP partition, one Linux /home partition, one Linux root partition, one Linux swap partition. £70 inc. P&P
New GPU!!! nVidia 9800GT 512MB GDDR3 RAM PCI express x16 (duh). £100 inc. P&P

Ubuntu reinstall

I have had various problems with my Ubuntu installation:

Deb package installer not working, add/remove not working, compiz not working, etc.

So i decided to reinstall Ubuntu completely...

I backed up my user Dir onto my new 4GB (W00T!!) mem stick then made a Ubuntu 8.04.1 disk and tested it thoroughly then reinstalled Ubuntu (forgetting to make a backup partition :-( oh well...) and then installed Ubuntu studio and some other apps and walla!! It worked!!!

Few!!!

The only problem i had is forgot to show the hidden files when copying my user Dir so i lost my Uplink user file that i had been playing on (Dow!! :-[ )

HDD upgrade

OK I've finally gotten round to getting a new HDD for my Linux box...it should be coming next Tuesday (15 april 2008) at the very latest (it's already been dispatched). Here's the specs:

Western Digital Caviar
160GB
8MB cache
ATA 100
8.9ms average seek time
2ms track-to-track seek time
7200 RPM
rated 50,000 Start / Stop Cycles
3.5" form factor
3 year warranty

I would've got Serial-ATA, but my motherboard's way too stone-age for that...the good news is: it cost me £35 with VAT+postage. Yippee! :) i would really reccomend the seller (novatech.co.uk) for it's low prices.

B-Day

It was my birthday yesterday and this is what i got:

USB Microscope up to 1280x magnification;
1GB RAM for my Ubuntu PC (so that now I have 1.1GB or 1152MB RAM in it :));
Snakehead (the seventh Alex Rider book developed by Anthony Horowitz);
£90;
DVD (can't remember what);
Chocolate thingy saying Happy Birthday;
A tent;
A backpack that you fill with water (called a 'bladder');

I've also ordered for myself (partly with the £90):

Samsung Syncmaster 920NW 19" Widescreen 16:10, up to 1440x900 @ 75Hz;
nVidia Geforce FX5200 128MB PCI Graphics card w/ DVI, VGA, S-Video out;

I'm very happy about the screen and the graphics card, those right now are probably the lowest spec things in my Ubuntu PC (apart from maybe the Intel P4 1.8GHz, i hate to say).

14" CRT 1024x768 @ 60Hz ==>> 19" LCD 1440x900 @ 75Hz;
nVidia Vanta w/ VGA 16MB ==>> nVidia Geforce w/ DVI+VGA+SVideo 128MB;

the first ones are the specs i have now, the second are the ones i'm upgrading to.

Hopefully sometime in the near future i should also upgrade my CPU (as it's upgradeable, i have a Compaq Evo D500 Small Form Factor), and the 20GB HDD. Then it would basically be a new computer! so far (as in when the graphics card comes) it's new/upgraded:

RAM;
Graphics;
CD-ROM (upgraded to DVD+-RW DL);
USB 2.0 card;
OS (from Windows to Ubuntu, i consider that an upgrade ;))