Ubuntu 14.04

Been a while since I updated here, but I have not had the time to play around with my XPS to really come with some feedback. But once 14.04 I immediately updated and have been running it for a while. One thing I only recently noticed is that now the touch screen support is much much better. It now supports drag to scroll, like you do on a mobile device, which really saves you time. I have not really played too much around with the touch screen to tell of any other improvements (most importantly the freezing issues if you use it too much).

Why liveCD is bad for your weekend

Last weekend I was feeling a rush for a switch, so I went looking for a new distro. I ended up going for Chakra, cause I downloaded the liveCD just to take it for a spin. Problem is when you are feeling the itch, you are very excited for everything new, which in some cases make you forget why you dislike KDE in the first place.

This pretty much resulted in me spending half my saturday downloading different systems (Mageia GNOME Live and ZenWalk 7.0 Live), figuring out why they won’t work, then redownloading your original distro, having 3 botched installs due to incompatibilities between the dbus version, which result in you having to format your home partition to freaking solve it. Total time wasted: Saturday evening + sunday morning until afternoon. Be smart about it…

Why I want / won’t to jump to Sabayon

I have been using Xubuntu 10.10 recently, mostly because Arch Linux absolutely refuses to connect through wireless on install CD through cli. So I have been feeling the itch to switch it up, mostly because my wireless card is so unstable in Xubuntu right now (constant time outs is annoying). So I downloaded the live DVD of Sabayon XFCE, and gave it a spin. 

Fedora 15 XFCE Spin

After using Xubuntu for a while, I noticed some hardware issues with my wireless keyboard and mouse. Mostly, it would not recognize keystrokes and mouse clicks. Annyoing as this was, I decided to jump to another distribution, thinking it was a (X)ubuntu problem. As Fedora 15 just had released, and I have not had a go at it since 8, I figured it was probably the best bet (also because I could not really connect to my wireless network using Arch Linux, which was my number 1 choice).

Ubuntu 11.04… Ehh, no, make that Xubuntu 11.04 pls

So Ubuntu 11.04 was finally released this weekend, with the much anticipated (or dreaded) implementation on Unity instead of GNOME as the desktop shell. Well, I was at least anticipating this one, hoping that Unity would be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise slow moving GNOME development (and I did not like how GNOME 3 is looking either, seems like they are heading the same way as KDE4). Well, I was wrong, I absolutely hated Unity!

Ubuntu 10.10

I recently switched from Mandriva back to Ubuntu for various reasons, like performance. I must say, allot of improvements have been made.

For one, the boot (and shut down) is incredible fast. It even boots faster than my last install of Arch Linux (though on a different computer), and shut down is more or less instant. As for more practical uses, there isn’t many changes. The standard theme is the same, and a small hack is needed for moving the window controls.

The software has been overhauled, but still it has a way to go before it is comparable to Synaptic. One annoyances is that they for (reasons unknown) removed aptitude from standard. If you don’t know what aptitude is, it is a replacement for apt-get, with better dependency handling and better search function. However, a quick fix is to just install it:

sudo apt-get install aptitude

In summary, 10.10  improves mostly on performance. Other than that it is mostly a version boost of your software.

Jump 01

I have been using Linux at my home computer for a while now, ever since Ubuntu 7.04 (or Feisty). However, randomly I feel that something is wrong with my desktop, and I make the jump to another distro, usually at random.

For the most part I jump between the largest, usually I prefer debian based distro’s as I know where to find stuff there. So for the past year I have been using Ubuntu, and have been happy about that. But the other day the bug bit me again, when my graphic card suddenly reverted to to the built in. While this was due to the fact that one of the connectors to the PSU was loose, I still saw it as a reason to switch.