The Lair

I spent the morning upgrading to Dapper Drake, the next Ubuntu release. Incidentally, my laptop (for this is the machine which permanently dualboots Windows and Linux) started with Warty Warthog, then got a dist-upgrade to Hoary Hedgehog, then to Breezy Badger and now onto Dapper Drake. No reinstalls, just dist-upgrade each time and the major things just work (with a bit of tweaking). That’s pretty darn impressive, if you ask me.

So much for the good news. The bad news is that I spent the morning fighting Dapper Drake. At the moment, the scoreline is Dapper 1: Drac 0. There is nothing wrong with the default upgrade procedure, just a few minor conflicts with some bleeding edge packages that I had installed from other sources. The new Gnome looks very … orange and it seems that hibernation and other functions that one comes to expect from laptops actually work. Much to my shock and horror, it even seems like ACPI detects the battery charge level. Wooo. No luck yet with encrypted wLAN though. Fuggit.

The really bad news is that Dapper Drake packages a bleeding edge, SVN updated version of XFCE. My settings got hosed; my careful menu customizations were ignored and general chaos ensued. Even worse, the bleeding edge Dapper XFCE does not include all the goodies (where is lil star? why remove it? whyyyy?). Revert to the old XFCE ? Nuh huh. No can do. So, in a fit of juvenile pique, I threw the obligatory hissy fit (Oh noes. My desktop environment of choice doesn’t work!) and booted back into Windows.

My options at this point appear to be: compile the goodies from scratch off SVN source, beg/plead/threaten people till the Xubuntu crowd update xfce4-iconbox or switch to another DE/WM. I suppose its as good a time as any to try out the intriguing Ion or even the more conventional Fluxbox/Blackbox WMs but ummm… I just want to get some work done this week? I’m easily twice as productive with a familar (read: heavily customized) desktop environment than with a plain vanilla Gnome or KDE. Even worse, it seems like Dapper Drake could become Ubuntu 6.06 (instead of 6.04). The rationale for this possible delay is explained here. That means two more months before packages have to be frozen in place. *sigh*. It’s all a conspiracy to drive me back to XP, I tell you.

In other news, it appears that the student bars around campus are being threatened with closure. The response from the SU? Urge everyone to go to the bars last week (I was oblivious, as usual) and then, boycott the bars this week. Geddit? Barcott. I am Jack’s utter lack of concern about all of this though. Wake me up when the campus bars start offering edible food because till that point in time, there really isn’t much reason for a visit there.

I upgraded from the currently stable Hoary Hedgehog Ubuntu release to the almost ready Breezy Badger release a couple of days ago. Just felt too sickish to write about it till now.

All in all, the upgrade was seamless, with very little fiddling and poking of config files required. One regret I have is my (unfounded) belief that package maintainers know more about my system than I do. Each time I was asked if my configuration file should be overwritten (application_menu, fontconfig, gdm config) I had a quick look at the diff and said yes. Ultimately, this meant I lost all my fancy font tweaks for the laptop LCD screen and gdm threw a warning when I tried logging in. Easily fixable in both instances. I just needed to turn on subpixel rendering again – and gdm threw an error because the new gdm gets annoyed if a custom gdm theme is installed – the factory gdm.conf needs to be used and the theme reset. Not a major inconvenience.

Other than the new and shiny versions of the software that I use, Breezy Badger doesn’t seem to offer me a whole lot that is significantly different on the exterior. Perhaps this is because I adopt a slightly unconventional approach and mix in conventional Debian software, backports and standard Ubuntu style software in one gigantic mishmash. Somewhat more distressingly, nothing packaged by default in Ubuntu can read or understand the battery status on my laptop yet (a huge drawback) and encrypted wireless is still a no-go. Somewhat ironically, this means that when I’m travelling – if I need wireless on Linux, my only option would be to wardrive someone’s open connection; seeing that my legal-to-use WEP encrypted connection isn’t accessible.

And mad props to the Beeb for The Space Race. The final part screened a couple of days ago and I’m waiting for the DVD release. All about America vs the USSR on their race to outer space and the moon, mostly focused on the development of rocket technology and the political infighting. Historical video footage meshed with actors playing the major players on both sides. It was easily the best thing I’ve seen on TV in ages.

And I just couldn’t resist poking in a quiz at the last moment – which discworld character are you ? . (I’m guessing it will be one of Greebo, Vetinari or Cohen the Barbarian. Possibly a smattering of Rincewind thrown in for good measure. And hey, I like bananas, so maybe the Librarian ?)
Update: Ye gods and little fishes. I am Granny Weatherwax, Death and Vetinari combined. All of them equally probable. Sweet!