Catch up

Been a bit quiet on the old blogging front of late, but there's been a bit on. I've had a lot of attention on the election, wedding issues have been around and my car has been a little scamp in getting through the MOT.

However, I've still been being a nerd!

Ubuntu 10.4! Yay, the new long term support release, and it's a bit of a big change for Ubuntu, as it's not brown! What's more, it's really easy to setup. At least it is on my system. Now it's around a year since I first made the leap to a Linux system, starting with Ubuntu 9.04. That took a little fiddling and prodding to get working. Mainly in display issues, I had to search around for a rewrite to the xorg.conf file to get my monitor working. Generally everything else worked fine and I had an enjoyable time with it. When 9.10 arrived I had a little more trouble, the Pulse Audio being my biggest problem. I also seemed to break Gnome when I installed a new video card, but a re-install of Ubuntu fixed this. However, I could not get my head around the sound and it was only a recently I got the audio in properly, before then my maximum volume was about half what you'd expect. I did find an easy solution was to install a KDE desktop and turn it into Kubuntu. This gave me awesome sound and obviously some beautiful graphics. So much so that when I upgraded to 10.4, still run mainly in the Kubuntu desktop. I've just become attached to it, though there are some elements of Gnome I prefer. The package manager is easier in Ubuntu than Kubuntu, at least for me. Still I'm 99% in Kubuntu now.

So the upgrade to 10.04 went pretty smoothly, and so far I've had to do... absolutely nothing. Everything just works this time round. Now a while back I was singing the praises of Linux for making my PC fun again as I had to find fixes for little niggles. That was part of the charm and made me nostalgic for the old days when I ran Windows 95 on a P75 with 8MB Ram and an 850MB hard drive. But to be honest, I really don't have the time that I used to, so there's a lot to be said for having a system that works. And doesn't prompt be about security software every 30 seconds. Or treat me to 30 different voice bubbles about how it's setting up my new memory stick. Or crash for no discernible reason. Boots up in a reasonable time. Etc, etc... And this means the time I do have can be spent trying out Jamendo. Hey, there's good music available there, it's an awesome site. Oh, and I'm setting a virtual machine up to give Chromium a try. Have to see, I have tended towards Chrome as a browser for months now. I'll also need a virtual machine set up for Windows again, so I can get these Doctor Who Interactive episodes that are coming up soon.