Laney's blog

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try out Ubuntu for kicks, and to turn my PC back into something I can fiddle around with. Well, it seems that I got my wish.

First of all, I couldn't get it to boot after installation. The installation itself appeared to go smoothly, but then upon rebooting I got the dreaded GRUB Error 17, which means "Invalid device requested". After hours days of messing around with BIOS settings, grub-install witchcraft and the like, I had pretty much decided that I just wasn't going to get it to work on my IDE drive, and decided to try it on a SATA. This almost went smoothly; on the first boot, I got sent straight to Vista, but Super GRUB Disk, with its charming broken English fixed me right up. Almost. I had to edit one of the lines in the GRUB config file that it had created to point to the right HDD, but I had finally gotten into Linux!

On first impressions, everything was great: sound worked out of the box, MSN support was there and very nice, and Synaptic made installing new software a breeze. Since then, things have been mostly good; for someone like myself who doesn't mind the occasional trip down CLI-lane, it's definitely usable for day-to-day work. I'll quickly list my remaining niggles, just to get them out there.

• Compiz Fusion is a bit buggy, and seems to take up a lot of CPU time. Sometimes when I maximise windows, they jiggle around constantly until I unmaximise them.
• The media players aren't quite there yet. Rhythmbox is a bit flaky and most of the time won't let me navigate the playlist with my arrow keys after being alt-tabbed to. Banshee seems a bit thin feature-wise. Amarok loves to peg the CPU and crash, and has weird keyboard-navigation too (although it is the one I'm currently using for its wealth of features, decent iPod support and nice global hotkeys).
• It took me a little while to realise this, but only the front speaker of my 5.1 was enabled by default. I had to drop into alsamixer to unmute and enable all the others, after which they worked just fine. Also, somewhat confusingly, the volume control button on the taskbar comes set up to only control this one speaker. Changing it to control "PCM" seems to act more like the master volume switch that I expect it to.
• Even though I have turned off all options which I could find, my display still insists on suspending after 10 minutes of the computer being idle. This I have only just "solved" (in reality a hack) by commenting out Option "DPMS" in my xorg.conf file. Edit: Ok, this didn't actually solve anything. I'm stumped and Really Pissed Off.
• Related to the above, VLC (my media player of choice), doesn't seem to stop the display from suspending while playing media. Very annoying when trying to watch (say) a film.
• I still cannot get BBC radio streaming to work in Firefox. I'll probably have to install the official Realplayer, which I really don't want to do.
• The Java situation is very odd. I understand this is due to license issues. And no amd64 firefox plugin from Sun makes me sad, as the free Icedtea one doesn't want to work.

So there we have it. I'm enjoying it overall, but there are some annoying niggles. (I really don't like being told off on IRC for daring to express frustration) Given a few more releases, Ubuntu should have gotten rid of most of these things, making for a genuinely useful OS.

And the chance to get myself a VPS came sooner than I thought. Today a message came out on the bitfolk mailing list, saying that there were some 120M servers available. I quickly snapped one up and, as of next Monday, will be the proud owner of my first VPS. Let's see how quickly I can fuck that one up.

It'll just be running httpd and irssi at the start, although I may get brave and decide to host my email. Fun!

In other news, the dissertation interim report is nearly done. Only a gantt chart and "roadmap" to write then I can lay this to rest. Knocked up some nice diagrams in Inkscape, which I must say I'm growing quite fond of (even if the connector tool is currently a bit wonky). I've a presentation on it next Tuesday (11th), which I'm quite nervous about, not being a confident speaker and all. Ah well, it's only 10%; sure it'll be fine…

I managed to get Apache and WordPress installed on my shiny new Ubuntu PC, joy. Actually it's a bit weird; I ran the wordpress script to generate a configuration file for a mysql user wordpress, but never actually created the user on mysql. Then when I installed wordpress, the user was mysteriously already there. I wonder how it got created. Anyway, I'll hopefully be able to keep this up most of the time, but do bear in mind that it's my workstation so cannot be up constantly. I do have to reboot to Windows sometimes to play games y'know. When I get the chance I'll be grabbing a nice VPS at bitfolk, which should make things more stable.

Anyway this is mainly a test post. Soon I'll have my shiny Haskell blog which I'm writing for my dissertation up and running, and it will be able to take over from this. Yeah. It will.

In the meantime, expect more inane chatter.

Out.