Regardless, let’s say that $1.15 does equate to providing 8 meals. They’re using charitable giving to try and get people to upgrade their browser. It’s apparently not enough to just be a better browser, they have to try and bribe people with the promise of giving money to charity to get their product to be downloaded.  And as I already mentioned, if they get too many downloads, they’ll just cap it at $1 million, so it could end up being fifty cents per download, or 10, or 1… Bleh, I’m disgusted, Microsoft, disgusted.

At any rate, go download it anyway, and make sure you do it through www.browserforthebetter.com (otherwise, it doesn’t count). Not because Microsoft is being so generous, but to at least make them pay the $1 million dollars to charity. I’d recommend deleting the file after you download it also, then go download a real browser, like Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.

After letting the Live CD load up (not sure why you can’t have a ‘just install it for me’ option like Ubuntu), I started the installer. I wasn’t interested in playing around with a Live CD on this old laptop. It’s just too painful, and I was getting kernel failures like mad. Once I started the installer, things were going well, it even detected the computer name from the previous Ubuntu install. Then we got to the partitioning step. This is the place where we tell the installer how we want to use our hard drive (or let it do it’s own thing).

Being the optimist that I am, I let it do it’s own thing. It failed. The best part about this is, if the partitioner fails, it exits setup, and you have to start the installer again. That’s not quite as painful as it sounds, but still frustrating. I tried it again. Fail. Ok, I’ll do it myself. I created a swap partition, and then went to do my root partition. Hmm, no reiserfs, so I’ll stick with tried and true ext3. Fail. The install image on the CD was created from an ext4 filesystem, and somehow it’s impossible to use anything but ext4 on your root partition. Ok, whatever, I’m trying to give this a serious try, so I won’t let that stop me. Recreate the partition with ext4. Fail. You can’t boot from an ext4 formatted partition. From other reading, this is ridiculous, since Ubuntu (released a couple months ago) can boot from ext4 file systems just fine. Ok, so we’ll create a small ext2 formatted partition for /boot. Oddly enough, it recommended ext3, which is stupid, since the journal will eat up a good portion of your partition, and waste precious disk space. Some other fun things I noticed along the way. If you press the escape key while creating a partition, it actually creates the partition, instead of cancelling like it should. The arrow keys also cycle through the partition size options backwards as well. Finally, let’s do this install thingy. And it worked. One other item of note that I liked (because I’m an ntp nerd and run two of my own servers), is that it let you setup network clock synchronization during the installation process.

After completing the install, the display resolution on my laptop was not right, so I started trying to figure out how to fix that. I found a way, and had to install system-config-display. And then I remembered why I disliked Fedora before (and Red Hat, and Suse). RPM’s are the devil. After all that fun, what I really wanted to know, was how the speed compared to Ubuntu and Xubuntu on this laptop. So naturally, I have to go back and install them too. I timed the Fedora boot time: 1 minute and 20 seconds. It’s a far cry from the 20 seconds they mention as their target for this release, but I’m on slow hardware, and 1:20 is actually pretty good. I installed Xubuntu, and remembered that it wasn’t just Fedora that had issues with my display. In Ubuntu (and thus Xubuntu), I have to create the config file that sets the refresh rate for my monitor, and then it works at the right resolution. I timed Xubuntu. Ouch. It came in at over 1 minute and 45 seconds. My Ubuntu CD was apparently busted, so I burned a new one at work the next day. I had heard rumours that Xubuntu was kind of inefficient, but this just confirmed it. It seemed a tiny bit faster on loading menus and other trivial tasks, but nothing that would convince me to stick with it. I installed Ubuntu the next day, expecting something above 2 minutes for a boot time, and was pleasantly surprised. It booted almost identical to Fedora. So, thought I, I’ll go back to Fedora and just try living with it for a while to see how I like it (other than the RPMs).

Then the nightmare began. I had thought all the partitioning errors were behind me, but the Fedora installer was just getting started. I tried the same partitioning setup as before, and it went all the way to the end of copying the install image to the hard drive. Fail. It claimed it couldn’t load my /boot partition. I tried again, and it wouldn’t even load the partitioner. Then I got it to load if I told it I wanted a custom layout. It went all the way to the end again, and failed. After several more failures, of different types, I went to Google. It turns out that the partitioner for Anaconda (the Fedora installer) had been completely rewritten for this release. It was also completely in a broken state, and some people recommended using fdisk to partition your disks, instead of the installer. Hmm, yup, that’s going to be a great option for people that want to try out Linux. For the record, it does work, although I actually recommend cfdisk instead of fdisk.

Anyway, it’s installed now, and the fun will ensue shortly. I’ll have another post about that in a month or so.

My dad is always helping me around the house, and it seems he enjoys helping me more than going home and doing his own yardwork sometimes. Even when it’s just picking rocks out of the garden. I want to be like my dad (and my grandpa): helpful.

When I got home, I started troubleshooting, trying various audio settings, and changing volume levels on pretty much everything. I finally had some success when I switched the audio engine to OSS. I’ve been using Linux long enough to know that it wasn’t the solution I wanted. OSS is an old, deprecated sound system that is only kept around because some applications haven’t been updated in ages.

This at least gave me a starting point in my search on the Ubuntu forums, which are always super helpful. But audio issues on Linux are a dime a dozen, so it took me a while before I stumbled upon this post. I tried a couple of the things they mentioned, but nothing was working. Finally, there was mention of another post, which includes some information from one of the lead PulseAudio developers. As it turns out, the original implementation of PulseAudio by Ubuntu was very poorly done, and if you were upgrading, you still had all those broken settings lying around now that they’ve fixed things in Jaunty Jackalope. I followed the instructions for removing all the broken stuff, and tada, I had sound again. I celebrated by watching Hancock, and cranking the volume.

Then something else struck me. I wasn’t the only one. God missed it too. The ruler of the universe; the creator of everything; the omnipotent God who controls everything. He missed my worship. God wants, desires, even longs for the worship and adoration of his treasured creation, mankind. And yes, I know, worship is more than just singing and music, but for me, that’s the way I worship God best. When I lose that, I feel like a part of me has died. This morning, though, it was revived, and wow, did that feel amazing. Yes, it even drove me to tears as all these thoughts came rushing at once. I just had to share that with all of you.

So, here it is: On facebook, go to your Profile, and make sure you are on your Wall. Right below the ‘Write something…’ box, there is a Settings button. Click that, and the top section will say ‘Stories Posted by You’. As you can see, Multiply isn’t listed, but there is one called ‘Blog/RSS’. Click this, and it will ask you for the Public URL of your blog. For my Multiply site, it would be nosilver4u.multiply.com. Fill in yours, and click the Import button. Now it will automatically post anything from Multiply on your Facebook page. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way to go the other direction. This will also work for any other blogging site like blogspot, livejournal, or wordpress.com.

Now, back to linux. For those of us that use Linux, we get to choose between a hundred different Desktop Environments (and that’s probably underestimated). To the less eccentric, there’s typically only two choices though: GNOME and KDE. As I said before, I’ve chose GNOME pretty early on, but I actually tried KDE first, since it was what I had used when I bought my SuSE 7.2 discs back in the day (I subsequently sold those discs on eBay, and gave up on Linux for about 2 years). KDE has always been the eye-catching option, but as I’m a bit of a minimalist, GNOME struck my fancy. It seemed easier to customize, and had a leaner feel overall.

Every once in a blue moon I’m tempted by the allure of KDE once more, and today was one of those days. I’ve been sick, and bored, so I started installing Gentoo (I’ve used Ubuntu for the last 5 years) in a virtual machine (it’s like taking a chunk of your hard drive and making a spare computer out of it). I wasn’t going to do much more than that, but then the bug bit me. So once I had everything else working, I started preparing to install KDE on Gentoo. It was going to install 3.5.9, but I had already tried that version, and wanted to check out version 4. I found a nicely done tutorial, and wanted to see everything that would be installed. That’s when it happened. It smacked me right in the face. I almost fell over. It wanted to install MySQL. MySQL is a full-fledged database application commonly found on servers. This is a Desktop system, running Desktop applications. What could possibly require MySQL?

It turns out that Akonadai, part of the PIM (personal information management) set of packages is the culprit. Apparently, some people have so much personal information (contacts, calendar data, email, etc.), that SQlite (the former choice) doesn’t cut it anymore. That just boggles my mind. Of course, it shouldn’t, when I’ve seen college presidents that have over twelve thousand emails (just in the Inbox), several thousand contacts, and calendars that could choke a hippo.

In KDE’s defense, at least they don’t require you to actually setup the mysql server. However, KDE will have to be pretty slick to convince me that the extra little bit of fat is worth the switch this time. I’ve always found it to be bloated, and adding extra icing just adds more calories.

Respectfully Yours,
Dissatisfied Customer