Another Opinion Among Many

Warning! Geekiness ahead!

I was going to post this, but I was too far along in my “dist-upgrade” to be able to have this work. The kio_http handler was broken at the time I tried to post, so I’m finishing now, after a reboot.

I downloaded (what I thought was) Kubuntu’s Breezy RC, but it was the stable 5.04 (Hoary) version. Looks like Ubuntu has fixed their upgrade issues as the releases have gone by. That’s a good thing.

I chose to download the installer version and replaced Mepis on my hard drive (nothing seems to be a good Gentoo replacement, though). The install went quite quickly - about 25 minutes. There was an option to boot without DHCP, which was nice. When the networking was to be set up, the installer stopped and asked me what my IP settings were, which is the way I wanted it to. Not too many recent “Live-cd”-derived distributions seem to do this. Since the Ubuntu crowd seem to have developed with a lot of things borrowed from recent hardware discovery tools, I found this to be a pleasant addition to the bootscripts.

The installer also asked me how and where I wanted to install. Since I’ve been installing Linux to the slave drive on the first controller and putting the bootloader on the first drive (with Windows XP on it), I have been paying close attention to how much work was involved on my part to get this to work, as there should be no extra work or headaches. There wasn’t. It installed GRUB neatly in the MBR of the master drive, which is what I wanted it to do. Mepis also passed this test with flying colors.

When the installation was finished, the cd ejected and the installer asked me to reboot, when some configuration would occur. So, I did.

This is where Kubuntu reminded me that it really was Debian underneath. This paragraph also applies to my feelings on Mandrake/Mandriva. When the computer rebooted, the install continued, informing me that it would need to fetch 350MB of packages from the net to complete. Now, is this reasonable? I have a really fast cable connection so it doesn’t matter as much to me, but what about Kubuntu’s intended audience, the new user? Nobody seems to want to admit that if you really want a comfortable means of keeping your Linux system up to date, then you’re going to need a broadband connection to the internet. I mean, c’mon! 350 MB? Some dialup connections couldn’t download that much data over night, let alone do it sporadically while installing. These updates, I’m assuming, came from the directory with the bugfixes found after the officially release of “Hoary”. Why didn’t they point us to an updated ISO for download? 5.04 was released 6 months ago. It seems that if you don’t want all updates in a big chunk, you’d better download and install a release the very day its released, to avoid tremendously large updates. I shouldn’t say that this is the Debian way, because when enough bugfixes exist, a new ISO (point-release) is put on the mirrors and its announced.

Well, it booted and seems to run, at least for the 10 minutes I explored it. Now, after going to the forum, I read that I should be able to “dist-upgrade” to the latest RC of 5.10, so I’m trying that now. I’m writing this post from within my new Kubuntu install right now. I’ll let you know shortly if the system survives the upgrade…

Well, guess what! I’m back (obviously) in the new system and it seems to have been upgraded successfully. If this is what we’re to expect from Breezy, then K/Ubuntu, then its going to be a fun time in the Linux world. There seems to be quite a bit of polish in this release. Who knows, I may actually have a new recommendation for newbies (providing that there isn’t a huge update the second you install it). Kudos.

Screw you, jerk hiding behind moniker dot com’s “privacy” shield, protecting yourself from spam. Neat how a spammer can buy protection from spamming. As I referred to in a previous blog post, which got a fair amount of attention, I’m not too fond of comment spammers who want to cheat the search engines and you and I out of a real search result for keywords. Do it legitimately with CONTENT like the rest of us! Ironically, I just got a comment sent to my moderation cue on that post, and who is it, but a p o k e r spammer. Irony. The question is, how did I moderate it? Did I allow the comment for “debate”? No. Did I just delete it? No. Not enough fun. Yes, you got it! I hit the “This is Spam” button. Now, I didn’t stab it. No. I massaged it with a caress. Felt good to watch the page refresh with the spammer’s ilk washed from my worthy post.

In case you are curious who they are, well I can tell you the site that they want you to go to (and probably download a keystroke logger to steal your logins), but I will space the words out because I don’t want them to get what they came for. The owners of p o k e r - h o l d e m dot com are scum (but thanks for the stuff to post about, sphincter boys). Nice try, though.

Neat! The European parliament ruled against the stupid patent legilslation that could have stifled innovation and crippled open source development. Congratulations on the increased better news.

NEAT! This author deserves some recognition!

For some reason, I just had to blog this:

My daughter, Abigail, is three (just turned on Feb 10, not long ago at all). She’s been allowed to take a short while and care for “Q-Bear”, a small teddy bear that her big brother brought home from school for the purposes of learning some responsibility. His charge is to take care of the bear and write about their time together in a journal. That bear has been around (nearly everyone’s grandparents, the Dr., and even Cape Breton - about 9 to 10 hours of straight driving on the highway from here)!

With Q-Bear, Abby has come out with one of her “I’m starting to get it” verbal gems. The small things never cease to amaze me. She was looking for Q-Bear’s hat, so she was rooting around in his (he’s a boy, it seems) bag for it, she was jabbering away like any 3 year old does, “Where is hat! Where is hat!”

Suddenly, she exclaims, “I found me a hat!”

I found me a hat. That’s an interesting way of saying it, especially in such a clear manner. Some may find me delerious, but I think that its a neat thing when a young one shows signs that they are “getting it” and this is an example. I know that this is not the best example of grammatical complexity or genious, but it is a great example of cultural complexity.

Children seem to learn in a simple, direct manner first. After all, their reason for blurting out whatever it is in the first place is to get results. And, since they don’t have a good command of the structure of sentances yet (although my little monster seems to be on a roll), they use simple phrases to get things done. “I want Juice” seems to be the extent of it at first.

So, when a casual sounding phrase like “I found me a hat” comes out of nowhere, I take notice. Its not just that one sentance only, of course. When you’re having a great game of peek-a-boo and the response is “Here I am!” instead of “I here”, you know she’s growing up. And, you know that she’s listening.

WARNING: Geek Rant Ahead!!!…you’re on your own from here…

/rant on
I don’t know how many people read my musings, but for those who do, I bet you’ve realized that I’m a bit of a Linux fan. Right now I run Gentoo, not because its a geek distro, but because its easy to maintain and relatively crashless (I say relatively because someday it may crash, really, it may). There’s only one problem that I am finding right now. I’m sure that its the same for any of the testing or bleeding edge branches of any distro (like Mandrake Cooker or Debian Sid). I run testing so I get all the new stuff. Its not that Gentoo’s got a problem. Its that X.org has a problem. For some reason, after the 6.8.0 release, they stopped supporting hardware accelleration, in favor of composite, which, although neat, is resource-intensive and only good for pretty screenshots, IMHO. Since I run testing, I get the newest software that’s proclaimed stable enough for human consumption, which means it tries to update X.org every time I emerge --sync It overwrites my /package.mask file every time. I guess that I’ve gotta read the forum and how-tos to find out how to mask a package on update instead of editing a file.
/rant off

I just finished watching Constantine tonight. What a good movie! I must say that I’ve become a Keanu convert since The Matrix came out (although the third one was a bit trying on the patience). This movie rocked! What a neat storyline. Kinda like Ghostbusters meets The Seventh Sign. I encourage everyone to watch this movie. Its going to keep you entertained!