Upgrades
I hadn't updated my main Gentoo
system in a while, mostly just due to laziness. I'd just emerge a
new version of a package if I was feeling in the mood for an update.
Last weekend, though, I did a full update. Meaning I
now have Gnome 2.8, Evolution
2.0 (in addition to 1.4, for ExchangeItEvolution
goodness, thanks to Gentoo's awesome
slot system) and the hal/udev/dbus stack.
Quite frankly, I found Gnome 2.8 to be
a bit underwhelming. Not much has changed since 2.6. Samba browsing
seems to work marginally better, in that it doesn't blatantly
crash as often, but it still doesn't show any shares. It works
if you use the "go to location" dealy and enter something like
"smb://myserver/myshare" but that isn't really browsing,
is it? I imagine it must work for somebody. Either that or
Gnome's QA team just never tests
it. But louie
and gang seem pretty pulled together. Maybe I'll ask some people
on IRC how to make it actually browse stuff. Not that I
really need it; I use NFS usually (not quite brave enough for FunFS on my music share,
unfortunately).
One thing, however, that totally frustrated me about the new Gnome
was how they redid the "add to panel" stuff. I can understand why
they wanted to do something about it, since the old system required
navigating through eleventy billion (yet) menus. But the new dialog,
while it sure is simple, is IMO actually harder to use:
New "add to panel" dialog in Gnome 2.8
Why, oh why, would you want to sort this thing alphabetically?
Notice the "Application launcher" thingy is right there at the top,
but only by coincidence. The "Custom application launcher" thing
(which lets you add a panel icon to launch an app that isn't in the
menu) is further down, for example. Not to mention that applets that
have nothing to do with each other are side by side, like the freaking
weather report and window list (taskbar).
This thing is just begging for categories. The funny thing is
they had categories for the applets before; there were amusements,
utilities, etc. It made finding stuff much easier. Initially when
I tried to add an application launcher to the panel, I thought that
dialog only had applets because I saw all kinds of applets in there,
and expected there to be a separate category for launchers.
Sometimes I see the things they do in Gnome and I really feel like there are
lot of people working on it that "get it." And I think Gnome hackers
generally are pretty conscious of usability these days. But then you
see things like this, that are pretty serious usability regressions
from the previous version, and you just sit there and say.. What The
Fuck? Sigh.
Ubuntu
So, I joined the gang and threw Ubuntu on my iBook after replacing
the disk. I figured "hey, a Debian that isn't a bitch to install,
cool." And it does live up to that, but I don't find it to be
the baby-saving world-hunger-ending bliss that everybody else
seems to. First of all, the included apmd doesn't seem to support
sleep, which the default debian apmd did. It also has weird shutdown
issues. Sometimes it goes to sleep (interesting, since it'll never do
that when I want it to) during the shutdown procedure. Pretty
annoying, since the next time you try to use the laptop, it powers on,
only to finish shutting down.
It also has some serious power issues. It sucks juice faster than
Andrew can drink beer. There are all kinds of crazy cron jobs that
keep the disk running all the time, and I suspect the kernel has
very little, or poor, power management support in it. It sucked my
battery dry today in a little over an hour; OS X, by comparison,
will easily last 4 hours and Debian could manage nearly 2 (without
any serious tweaking; just installed apmd and cpufreqd).
Don't get me wrong; Ubuntu
is pretty damn good for a first shot. It got my X configuration
right the first time. But its installation is no better than
Fedora's Anaconda or SuSE's YaST. It is better than
Debian's previous installer, but that's not saying much. Other than the
installer, I don't find anything too special about it. It is slimmed
down, which is good for some I suppose, but mostly a hindrance to me,
since I want all kinds of stuff like cvs and make and gcc anyway.
Life
Will be living with mag,
drheld and
iMac next term. Should be fun. And
distinctly not cold. We're living in Palo Alto, just a short walk
from the CalTrain station. The pictures of the house that I've seen
looked pretty nice. And, uh, that's about all I can say because I've
never even been to the area before!
Might come to Montréal with mrwise sometime soon. He needs
to find a place to live and I need some drunken debauchery. We're
thinking the weekend of Dec. 11th maybe...