Ubuntu Karmic tryouts

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:04:00 +0200

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.

OSCON 2008 registration confirmation

Jean-Baptiste Kempf — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:18:00 -0700

Dear Jean-Baptiste Kempf,

You are now registered for OSCON 2008.

Hey, so, I'll be in Portland, Oregon for VideoLAN in the end of july...

Want to meet there ?