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Monday, October 5 2009

Ubuntu Karmic tryouts

Ubuntu update required

My girlfriend had a very weird bug on her openoffice and on many gtk apps, where hovering the buttons or going one page down or up wouldn’t refresh the display correctly. I have tried many things, but nothing worked correctly. She had also weird bugs while using WPA2 WiFi network.

So, instead of doing an update, as usual, I took the beta of the Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 and reinstalled the laptop.
I usually have /home on separate partitions, and that proved once again to be a good idea.

Installations

The installation went without many issues, once I fixed the Dell MediaDirect mess that screwed up the partition table. The installation was quite fast too. The new look seems quite ok, but nothing "woauw".

Then, I reinstalled it on 3 other machines.

Good

  • Great installation, wifi and most devices worked, without issues,
  • Many applications correctly installed,
  • Great new look for the windows and overall look,
  • Ubuntu Software Center seems quite a nice step forward,
  • vlc has moved from multiverse to universe and is up-to-date,

Bad

  • nVidia drivers install is still counter-logical,
  • Humanity icons suck. Orange ones are too much of the same, and the grey ones (WiFi and so on) are impossible to read,
  • F-Spot and Tomboy… .Net crap and slow… Seriously I don’t get it.

Meeting Mark and Ubunteros

For some reasons, I met Mark at a conference and said "Hi!". Nothing important, but still cool.

He made a cool talk about Cadence, Quality and Design.

Then, I met a few cool Ubuntu developers (and former DD) and it was nice, except that we had a big discussion about vlc not being in main.

Here are some of the reasons and some ‘bad faith’ comments from me:

  • VLC is too big for core install (haha, Mono!)
  • there is already one multimedia stack, GStreamer (then WTF does xine hang there?)

Anyway, it was quite cool, and this Ubuntu release seems very promising.

Sunday, February 15 2009

Debian Lenny released!

$subject!

Congratulation, Debian team...

And sid is now unfrozen!

Sunday, November 23 2008

New Machine

In order to do some Windows development for VLC, I just bought myself a new machine:

  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
  • Noctua NH-U12P
  • 2x2GB G.Skill RAM
  • Asus P5Q-E
  • Radeon HD4670
  • Pioneer DVD-Drive
  • Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB
  • Sonata 3 Case

Issues

I had huge issues to make this working correctly.

Motherboard

First, my Asus board controller was completely broken... I couldn't boot ANY install CD and memtest was screaming so much...

I went back to the store to change it...

Graphic Card

I initially had the gigabyte HD4670, with a native HDMI output.

The fan was so load (100%) all the time that this was such a pain, I couldn't deal with it.

I went back to the store, and they changed it to another Gigabyte that had the same problem. Therefore, they gave me a Sapphire and the card has been working great so far.

ATAPI CD-ROM

Finally, I couldn't boot the Vista 64bits CD because of some issue that made the installer crash. In fact, when trying to load a driver to run the CD, the Vista64bit installer from the CD was just crashing...

I tried different stuffs, but my old DVD writer could get an improvement with the rest of the machine...

Impressions

The computer is very fast and Vista64 is not that bad... Windows still crashes way too much (one BSOD every 2 days or so, usually in USB driver or NTFS driver), but well, what did I expect?

Monday, November 3 2008

Ubuntu migrations to 8.10

This post is about the new update to Ubuntu 8.10, as usual.

This narrates the few issues that I had during the process...

Continue reading...

Update to Vista SP1 (follow up) Failure 0x800F0826

Here I am, updating some old posts, that I had forgotten about...

Vista Update post

The first one is an update to a one-year-old post about a problem: during Vista SP1 update

Remembering the Issue

The issue was that:

And then Vista tells me it couldn't install my computer because error 0x800F0826.

And I was thinking of waiting for final release to fix it... Of course, it didn't work.

This happens when Vista Ultimate is used on a multiboot machine.

Solution

The solution was to give back the bootloader to Vista Bootloader and not Grub. So, configure again the Vista Bootloader and write changes to disk.

Then reboot and update to Vista SP1.

Reinstore Grub as your main Bootloader using the usual tools :D

Wednesday, April 16 2008

Dotclear 2.0RC in may!

As you might know, this blog runs with dotclear2.

The Dotclear 2 development was more than slow, but they seemed to catch up lately:

Dotclear 2 announce

This is good news.

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