I love my Acer Aspire Revo r3610

November 14, 2009 at 23:40 (Hardware, Linux)
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After my desktop died and I had no money to replace it I started using my Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop as my main machine, for the task it was pumped up with another gig of ram but it too started to die. As money is short I had to look around for a quick replacement that would do the trick. I could either build my own or buy something prebuilt, I long ago swore that I wouldn’t waste time building anymore so this left me with the choice of one of these new nettop machines. Having played with with an ATOM powered netbook I was a little skeptical of the performance potential of such a setup for desktop tasks but this was after all a dual core ATOM capable of SMT and 64bit computing, additionally it has the nvidia ION chipset and GPU instead of the under performing Intel parts. Finally the machine comes with S/PDIF sound output and beefy 4 gigs of ram (one of these are taken by the GPU), you also get a set of USB speakers and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo.

The good parts:

The machine is easily mountable using the VESA compliant mount for your monitor, the performance is surprisingly good. The desktop feels snappy and there always seems to be a bit to give from even under load, even video playback without hardware acceleration (I haven’t yet made VDPAU work) is smooth. All your basic hardware is functional out of the box and the machine is very quiet. You get a plentiful 6 USB ports but access when mounted on a monitor they can be hard to access, there is HDMI output but I haven’t had a chance to try this as I lack supporting hardware finally the revo features eSATA. In short a very extendable and capable machine that comes equipped for a multitude of use cases.

The bad parts:

The S/PDIF output is placed on the topside of the machine when mounted in the VESA mount, meaning your fairly inflexible optical cable will hang from a height with no decent way to make it look good without breaking it – a modest suggestion for the next revision would be to put it on the bottom. You need the proprietary nvidia driver to make this run at it’s full potential, something I would rather avoid as I am uncomfortable using it. My Revo came with Windows 7 Home which I now have to fight to get refunded for, for an average user it does mean that you get a machine that will work when you turn it on but I would have liked the option to pick no OS or Linux preinstalled. Finally the wireless keyboard and mouse doesn’t work with Linux for some reason and Google turns up no immediate help as to making them work – mainly here I am interested in the keyboard as I love my trackball.

All in all, the Revo r3610 is an impressive machine. I am very pleased with it and would wholeheartedly recommend it, not just as a second machine or a media center, it actually makes for a fully sufficient desktop machine and it is a great bargain.

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An examination of illegality benefiting everyone

September 29, 2009 at 21:00 (Uncategorized)

Sometimes I get upset over copyright, most recently Lily Allens public statements and requests that copyright be enforced with increasing strictness and demands that violators be persecuted harshly managed to trigger me. This is not about Ms. Allen’s unconsidered statements which artist Dan Bull and others already addressed. This is about a specific example of creativity that is very likely not legal but which benefiting everyone.

An artist going by the name Colorpulse recently released a piece called A Glorious Dawn which mixes samples of late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan from his fantastic mini-series Cosmos to produce a truly fantastic song. A song that in all likelihood would cost him his house and livelihood should the current rights holder elect to sue him. Here is why this would be a bad idea.

Cosmos ran in the 80’s and most of todays young people have not seen it at all, despite the fact that it is a wonderful mini-series that while that old is still very relevant in todays world. Carl Sagan more than any scientist in recent history has managed to convey why science is both beautiful and fascinating and why looking up at the stars should be a source of inspiration and wonder as well as understanding. Sagan inspired millions to pursue a life of seeking knowledge, he explained science in a way that got people excited. All that is sadly being lost now and Carl was robbed from this world by cancer more than a decade ago.

Without belittling the efforts of such people as Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others I hope, I would state that there isn’t any single scientist who has managed to take his place and continue furthering the public understanding of science with the same vitality and excitement as Sagan did. Most in the younger generation have not had a chance to get to know his work, his books or his bubbling enthusiasm for understanding nor anyones popular works of science for that matter. We are seeing bits here and there in popular entertainment but gone are the days when Carl Sagan would wow audiences with tales of recent discoveries from the cosmos we all inhabit on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Science isn’t for the public anymore and it suffers because of it.

This song is a tribute to Sagan and by providing a catchy way for the younger generation to learn of his work, a fraction of them might go and watch Cosmos. Some might even buy it or read one of his excellent books (personally I recommend The Demon-Haunted World and Pale Blue Dot). This would generate revenue and benefit society as well.

The young people for whom this experience proves to be the spark that lights a lifelong love of knowledge might grow up to be engineers, doctors, astronomers, biologists, teachers. For those that do not manage to get involve with science or do not wish to, one might hope that such an experience instilled at least a respect science and those who use it to let the universe reveal it’s workings to us and an understanding of the importance it plays. One can still look at the sky and wonder even if one does not do it through a telescope, I catch myself doing that on night walks and the experience and wonder is overwhelming even when I acknowledge that I alone will never understand it all. I am happy knowing that a multitude of people around me like me understand little bits and together we and generations to come might piece those bits together to form the whole picture.. still it remains beautiful, awe inspiring, terrifying and yet simply wonderful.

A Glorious Dawn is also a fantastic display of creativity, clearly Colorpulse takes something that was Sagans and makes it his own. This kind of experimentation and playful exploration of culture could lead anywhere. The people who discover their way of expressing themselves this way might end up enriching society in ways we could never have imagined. I thank Colorpulse for enriching society, for bringing joy to my heart and for making me think.

Killing that before it happens deprives us all.

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When Ubuntu hates upstream

September 28, 2009 at 09:33 (Linux, Ubuntu)
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Sometimes Ubuntu pisses me off, like the time they let an aMSN bug that crippled webcam support with a patch linger for several months, sadly now they are at it again.

Banshee 1.4.3 went out of the door with an embarrassing bug in the cover art plugin that made it take up 100% CPU, these things happen. The bug was quickly fixed and a patch was issued, there was however not a follow up .1 release for this problem and development went on for months in the 1.5.x branch instead. This means distributors still carry 1.4.3 as there is no 1.6 stable release yet. Most distributions love upstream and do not want to see their mailing lists flooded with tons of complaining users, they also want to make software look good so they apply the patch when asked politely… but not Ubuntu.

6 months, 4 days and counting, has gotten us what? Instructions on how to use Launchpad better but no patched builds.

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Congratulations Moblin on the 2.0 release

September 24, 2009 at 19:17 (Linux, Moblin, Personal)

Let the integration begin

Here are things I hope to see in future Moblin releases:

  • Better integration of instant messaging in the Moblin UI, having to drop an empathy window on an empty zone doesn’t feel very “mobliny”
  • Wordprocessing with collaboration features ala Sugars Write activity
  • ARM support
  • An integrated browser using process separation like Chrome for stability as well as having the UI rethought to maximize the usable work area. Hopefully a rewrite for WebKit could also happen.
  • Stop this Anjal silliness (yes we did debate that before, I remain unconvinced that this is even remotely the right direction)
  • I would love to see some version of Banshee in there, I have not had a good experience with homebrew media library.

A more general problem I see in computing today that Moblin and the type of device it is designed for reveal. I have probably a good TB of data lying around. Music in FLAC, a sufficient number of podcasts to make me look obsessed and naturally video. In fact I hope to add to this collection and have a centralized collection of all my movies. Now I have little desire to carry all that data with me and besides SSD drives should really not need to be more than 64 gigs tops. Yet the flaw in this plan is that we have no good means of transparently letting a nice little machine with some hardcore storage and a suitable Linux appliance act as if it is a seamless overlay on the filesystem when connection can be had be that my wifi or any secure means of calling home when I am away.

All our applications seem designed for local use and expect your full collection to be available on disk at all times and with this amount of storage required that is not possible. The popular solutions such as dropbox or Canonicals Ubuntu One all focus on synchronization which is not possible due to size and even if it was it would be impractical but worse still more certainly undesirable. If I was to lose my netbook and it had 700-800 gigs of my personal data on it, even with encryption I would feel pretty damn scared. I just need access to my data I don’t need it in my pocket as such.

I think we need to tackle this problem soon, I even suspect there is a business here in selling such devices capable of talking the quited protocols. A NAS on crack type device you put in a closet and which then via some nice open standards allow all your devices to have storage and data sharing, at home or out. There is e.g. no reason why my cellphone shouldn’t be able to use it’s 3G connection to stream my music or handle podcasts with storage being done in the safety of my home. Essentially I believe outside the storage taken up for applications and the OS on any device, in this scheme should be thought of as a cache for frequently used data on that device to allow it usefulness in situations without connection.

As a bonus for the redundancy seeking people one might add a paid service involving cloud storage. There are also promising p2p based systems like this which we could easily let the device act as a client for when the network is idle.

This would probably all be some Linux appliance homebrewers could slap on an idle clunker but there would definitely be a business in selling devices with extendable storage for this purpose as well.

The idea sounds vaguely like a cloud concept the average person should be able to follow and trust.. surely it is venture capital friendly.

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Why Miguel is my hero

September 24, 2009 at 18:31 (Community, Linux, Personal)
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As was recently reported by Martin Owens, at this years Software Freedom Day Richard Stallman took his behaviour to a whole new revolting level by calling Miguel de Icaza a traitor. This wasn’t related to anything except Miguels recent decision to sit on the Codeplex foundation board, a foundation whose stated mission it is to further Open Source in business. It is no secret that Microsoft is the seed of this our newest member in the family of Open Source promotors, even earmarking a million dollars to that aim and dedicating time and personnel to let the foundation reach its lofty aim. In fact in recent years Microsoft has gotten quite involved with Open Source by releasing code of their own, getting licenses approved from the OSI and donating substantial amounts of money to existing projects. In a highly published move they even recently submitted 20.000 lines of code to the Linux kernel. They are no longer the bully of the 90’s, they are changing but their transformation is not complete, and it certainly will not be the instantaneous conversion some people expect of them.

Now Miguel is no stranger to abuse, in a personally shameful moment right after the famed Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement, fueled by Bruce Perens’, fallacious, claim that the deal was in violation of the GPLv2 even I send the Novell Open Audio podcast an angry mail asking them to dedicate time debating this on the show. Miguel kindly wrote me a lengthy personal mail calming my fears and he never used a harsh word despite what I now realize were words far outside of rational discourse. I have since that moment had a tremendous amount of respect for Miguel as a person, he is probably the person in the community who faces the most opposition and abuse despite the amount of work he has done historically and continue to do to improve the free desktop. You might disagree with his methods of improvement but I have never seen Miguel use a tone of aggression in rebutting his opponents.

If I live to be a thousand years I will never master that level of calmness while under fire, I realise that with some degree of sadness. Had Richard viciously attacked me the way he did Miguel I am sure at tirade would have ensued, I know it to be my style. Miguels reply is nothing short of admirable. It is a constructive polite call for civility in the views on how to improve our community.

I am glad our community has someone like Miguel, I am glad he does the work he does and I believe that it fills a vital piece of the puzzle to get Open Source everywhere and turn former opponents into new friends. Utopia won’t be built in a day but Miguel certain laid his fair share of rocks to let it happen.

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A small degression on Moblin

July 19, 2009 at 13:43 (Linux, Moblin)

One of the newcomers to the OS scene is the Intel backed Linux Foundation project Moblin. Everyone has seen the videos by now but few people it seems have actually taken it for a spin.

I did that and tried to stick with it for a while on a usb stick and I made some observations.

Firstly Moblin should be commented for being the first to really rethink the whole interface, it feels rather snappy even on low end hardware and it works fairly well for the cases it is designed for. It also looks sexy which is important, your computing experience shouldn’t be dull. There are though some rough edges in the handling which I am sure will be worked out.

My main gripe with Moblin though is it’s porr judgement in what I might want to do on the road. E.g. in a world where more and more people use webmail they ship by default the Anjal frontend for the Evolution mail client. This is in a world where I am supposed to have decentralized data, they force upon me the requirement to have my filters only present on one machine as well as my addressbook. Why in the world can’t they just integrate GMail and other webmails properly and create a Zone for async communication (give it a fancy name people. that’s your job). It could replace that cut and paste traversty you have created. In this same world they also don’t integrate a wordprocessor, instead forcing me to use inferior online offerings (okay maybe not so much when MS Office 2010 web comes out). This on hardware that is already encumbered by tendencies towards slowness, I tell you Google docs runs slower than what is acceptable. Give me something akin to the Abiword based activitiy in the OLPC Sugar interface, telepathy tubes even allows pretty neat collaboration here which makes it a winner for these things. It’s lightweight and works fairly well for most wordprocessing cases. Additionally, it works when I am offline which shockingly still happens, e.g. when I am on a train (no 3G internet for me, to slow and unreliable currently).

The comes the plain buggy, such as the chat functionality which isn’t properly integrated with the new interface… making chat windows from Empathy pop up.. underneath the new Moblin interface and as there is no way to see a list of open windows in this zone.. you assume it crashed. However if you go to the open zones tab you can bring it forth and have a regular awesome Empathy experience. The standard Empathy complains still stand though, such as no webcam or custom smiley support for msn, there is no crypto or OTR support at all to be found either. Aside that the contact integration is very cool and helps with making the rethinking of instant messaging happen.

You have Twitter integration, but none for Identi.ca despite supporting the same API and being 100% open source. Something I find a bit strange especially since Indenti.ca seems so heavily favored with hackers and these betas might reflect that a tad some places.

Moblin tends to ignore that Google exists, their default search engine is Yahoo! and there seems to be no way of changing this. This is unforgivable and makes the webbrowser which is already a strangely unstable and visually inconsistent experience just that tad worse. At least ignoring Google is consistent, none of the popular Google apps are integrated into this new mobile internet experience OS – yes that does sound strange but it’s true. It’s also exactly the thing Microsoft has gotten sued over a number of times and been forced to offer choice to alliviate. Moblin please follow suit here. Also in a world where we are seeing more and more products use Webkit for it’s performance and low footprint Moblin elected to go with Mozilla which might prove to be an interesting choice. I suspect suspect some vendors will replace this at least.

Moblin also reinvented Network Manager which is a bit of a shame, especially since there seems to be no apparent need for this to happen. Their replacement doesn’t really seems to work very well but the interface for working with it is topnotch, very easy and foolproof.

There is a new core for managing music, videos and pictures, this seems though to be so early in development I have yet to figure out how to import music and video, nor play any of the demo clips, in addition it seems to crash rather often. I personally wish they had worked with the Banshee people on this one and gotten a stable platform to build something exciting on, like Aaron Bockovers new Cubano frontend for Banshee.

On the subject of crashing, everytime something crashes Moblin automatically offers to send a crash report to thei corewatcher service. What Apport did for Ubuntu this does without the requirement of an account, it all just happens with a single click like Windows offers.

I do wish though that Moblin would offer some options for safety and security. It automatically logs in with access to everything. I might have information I do not want people to just see and there isn’t really any mechanism to let that happen. The same thing with chatting, there are no options to encrypt this and if I am on a public access point I may not want everything I send especially to certain people to be readable in clear text floating around the room. Now the whole netbook platform is a compromise on this point but still once wishes they would at least acknowledge that somehow and give you the option to be a touh safer.

The conclusion can only be that Moblin is very young and where the polishing of it needs to happen it will in time by Moblin itself or by vendors. I suspect we will see good things but on the whole for an ambitious project that aims to reinvent the way we use computers it is shaping up very nicely. I look forward especially to what vendors will do with this, I know both Novell and Canonical are looking at Moblin for their netbook offerings, Novell having already started replacing Connman with Network Manager and I suspect we will see integration of the Cubano frontend for Banshee instead of the existing multimedia platform. I don’t know what Canonical are planning, they are currently keeping their hands firmly to themselves. So far I have to say the Goblin (Novell) incarnation of Moblin seems the most promising and the one I would be likely to recommend to people.

All in all I am very impressed with Moblin despite it’s flaws, I am hoping the interface will be able to scale to nettops and regular lap/desktop machines as it is a very pleasant way to interact with ones computer and I think it would be bold to let this replace the desktops we see today (and we see in development today).

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I’m not dead

July 19, 2009 at 13:03 (Linux, Mono, Personal, Roleplaying, Ubuntu, openSUSE)
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Some friends have started wondering why I stopped blogging. It’s not that I ran out of things to talk about, in fact recently outside starting a blog to talk about one of my other great passions pen and paper roleplaying (check out Pawn your wand), I have also been spending a bit of effort looking at gnome-shell. So far impressions of both the design reasoning and the application itself are utterly poor. But every time I sit down to write, the anger swells up inside me over the whole anti-mono crusade which is going on and I am tempted to add my say to the debate, yet I know that no matter how often the lies and slander of the anti-mono crowd is pointed out the very same points will return days later. It is like debating creationists, something long years experience has told me I do not have the stomach to do.

So I have spend time focusing on things I do like, I have been playing with Moblin (more on this later I promise), I have finally settled on a distribution – Ubuntu though part of me really wants to use openSUSE I just can’t get over their horrible  yast thingy and all this multiple repos which always seem to be poorly managed and in constant conflict. I also looked at Foresight, and was invited to join the team but Foresight just doesn’t deliver the integrated computing experience I have come to enjoy. E.g. why should I need to manually unlock the keyring upon login (btw. openSUSE you are guilty here as well). Aside that Foresight is very nice, just bear with Conary for being slow and instead spend your, lenghty, upgrade lounging in their IRC channel and you will discover the side that really sells Foresight. They have the nicest developers of any distro out there, always ready to help and to randomly shoot the breeze. I suspect superior tools gives you that calm edge and really I do want me some of that.

The one thing I dislike about Ubuntu is that they above all suffer from extreme cases of not invented here. They have their own bugtracker implementation (which makes me want to pull my hair out), they reject existing technologies such as plymouth and then go ahead and announcement their own basic reinvention of rhgb. They reject PackageKit and again write their own aptdaemon. It feels very much like they are positioning themselves intentionally to be as incompatible with other distros thus creating a lockin which is put mildly extremely uncool. I do love pkg-mono though, they know their stuff and are very helpful. In the end the presentation Ubuntu gives users is probably also the best we have to offer on a general desktop, there are still gapping holes to be filled but it’s a solid offering for which they should get praise.

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More on Windows 7

May 12, 2009 at 10:53 (Windows)

Having played a bit more with Windows 7 I did find a few things I miss from Linux. Firstly the ability to put a window always ontop, I like this for detached webcam windows so I can have my finacée sitting on top of everything while I am talking to her on skype using my nokia n810. It’s a little thing, but I have grown to find it very useful.

In the same vein I really don’t like the MSN client, it’s pretty but I can’t detach the webcam images and it shows little text ads. It just feels cumbersome and it is not geared towards making IM an integrated part of the desktop instead it tries to be one big horrible application.

In Windows a long standing problem is that every good mediaplayer e.g. will only support the codecs that it’s vendor has an interest in. This means that you download iTunes to use your iPod or get access to their podcast library (which we should admit is rather well designed), however one doesn’t have support for the ecosystem beyond Apple. There is no Ogg Vorbis or FLAC support which means a large part of my music collection is rendered worthless. The same problem is present with a lot of applications, and here Free Software comes to the rescue, looking at Banshee e.g. you get all of this support even if it is not always perfect (mtp e.g. seems to have problems with my Sansa Fuze). However if I am already going to replace core applications what is left is the core Windows which might as well be Linux for all I care, it is at least not worth the price of a full Windows to me.

Internet Explorer 8 is great, no really, I quite like it and was it not because the Google Chrome development release supports Windows 7 I would have continued to use it. They have managed to produce a very stable browser that works well, I think the entire internet wins because of it, just looking at how many people already use IE and will apply the upgrade. Like Chrome it has some containment going on and their Javascript engine provides very tolerable performance.

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Windows 7 mini review

May 10, 2009 at 14:39 (Personal, Windows)

I got my hands on the Windows 7 RC 64 bit build, and having tried it for a while I have to say that for the most part I really like what Microsoft has done. Unlike Linux on this laptop it feels smooth, the audio settings are easy and works a charm for managing and testing 5.1 setups like my own.

I think Microsoft did good work, for an RC it is very stable and the only application I have found that doesn’t work unfortunately Google Chrome. I have though only used the OS for a few hours, more extensive testing will be needed to weed out all the little trouble spots but the initial presentation is very pleasant. 

I love the audio settings and testing, I hope Pulseaudio gets to a stage where we can universally offer such UI enabled testing and preferences. It’s really that easy and comfortable in use. It just works(tm).

The little UI enhancements are great, unlike Compiz which seems more focused on making things burn, beam up or worse these really make a difference in use. E.g. when you click and drag a window to the top your cursor gives a little sonar blip and the window border is shown expanding to fullscreen. It is those little things that make it pleasant to the eye and adds to the experience. A good UI should aid the user and explain functionality, Windows 7’s revision of Aero does this very well and it remains smooth while doing so. 

Much has been written on the new taskbar and I have to say it is the sexiest new UI design Microsoft has done in a while. Peek is excellent in use, it is a visually pleasing way to solve the problem of application launching and task listing. Something in my opinion that has yet to be done either in Linux or OS X. The one problem I have seen is that there is a tendency for dialogs to pop under which leads to missing them for a while. I am very impressed.

I do miss the ability from metacity (and other window managers to put a window “always on top”. I use this a lot when chatting with the webcam on while working, it is nice to be able to see the person I am talking to on skype (I use a rather complicated setup where I have msn for the webcam on the laptop but I use skype on my nokia n810).

All in all Windows 7 RC is a very solid OS, it performs very smoothly and feels good in use. Windows users will see this as a nice upgrade. They have applied some of their prior successes more extensively e.g. users will find the Ribbon toolbar from the last Office release in Wordpad.

Some might remember that I wasn’t at all fond of Vista at the same stage in the game, and as a someone who has used nothing but Linux for more than a decade I am not familiar with the “Windows experience” but Windows 7 strikes me as being a nice solid offering. I am very pleased that Microsoft decided to bring their A game, hopefully this will spur competition and innovation.

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A little more time with Ubuntu

April 25, 2009 at 10:28 (GNOME, Linux, Mono, Ubuntu)
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In the quest for the perfect Linux for me, I decided to give Ubuntu a longer bit of time on my setup. This lead up largely to the weeks till the release of 9.04 meaning it is the latest Ubuntu has to offer.

Ubuntu has a very solidly frozen release which kinda bothers me since I either have to apply an unsupported PPA external repo to get the version of software upstream supports. This is the case for things like Banshee e.g.. In addition Ubuntu does not seem very willing to adopt software early which means that 9.04 ships with the older 0.9.14 version of Pulseaudio, which is a shame since 0.9.15 definitely is an improvement and finally lets me set up 5.1 (though still only analog). Again I can enable a PPA but that leads to a support nightmare (and breaks the awesomeness that is Apport) which I am not really prepared to bestove on anyone having worked with supporting users myself I know that I always like them to be in the most vanilla state I can get them to lessen my burden. This is a larger problem though of what to do with regards to the balance between a static release with updates and a rolling release. I do not believe this to be an easy problem ti solve but making people rely on PPAs to get important updates to X drivers and leaf applications like Banshee is not a good way to solve it from a QA point of view. What is, seems a huge problem space which would be interesting to explore.

There are also some really annoying moments, mostly when dealing with the package manager. I really miss an up to date PackageKit 0.4.x and interacting with apt-get or dpkg from the commandline just doesn’t feel as natural as using yum or rpm. The output of yum e.g. is very clean and easy to follow as is the out of rpm. In contrast dpkg has multiple lines of jibberish which one has to dig into to find simple information like version numbers for filing a bug report. I really think the time is approaching rapidly to have dpkg put down and radically redesigned, things like debhelper are especially poor designs for the target audience Ubuntu has. If you default to a situation where asking questions during the installation of updates you have failed. My metric for this is normally how quickly my mother would call upon me screaming “IT’S SAYING SOMETHING AGAIN!!! HELP”. Aside that dpkg is extremely frail for some reason, it falls over and gets it database corrupted quite quickly and unlike with rpm the recovery has not be easily discoverable (rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db.00* && rpmdb –rebuilddb normally takes care of it). It lacks some nice modern functionality like rollbacks and delta downloads, sadly it does’t look like it will gain them anytime soon either. I am concerned that I have yet to see a clear sign of commitment to PackageKit from Ubuntu, they don’t have the latest version and despite being marked as “in process for Jaunty” we still do not have it by default in any capacity.

I hate the fact that I can’t delete everything relating to gimp and openoffice without also losing my danish translations for everything else. Yes I know OpenOffice has features like a presentor that GNOME office does not have but AbiWord does just fine for me, it’s pretty, quick and very stable. I should be able to remove all those useless help files from OpenOffice as well. Minor nitpick I know but it seems that Ubuntu isn’t very flexible when it comes to changing these applications.

The Mono stack works beautifully, documentation is generated for everything and the coverage is near spotless (all I lack is Monsoon). You are given a full MonoDevelop stack. It’s truly a thing to behold how well kept it is and how much work has gone into making it the best Mono stack around. Additionally the excellent debian/ubuntu Mono team has done some impressive work cutting down the size of applications by removing Mono 1.x functionality meaning that now Banshee and all it’s dependencies take up less space on the CD than rhythmbox. I find this especially interesting as one of the, fallacious, accusations I got when proposing Banshee as the default media player in Fedora was that I disregarded the space contraints and I suggested just this solution to meet the requirement along with splitting out debug information. I am happy to see that it paid off for them and I hope that the patches will be broken out and pushed upstream where possible, also so other distros might benefit that they become available in something other than dpkgs default horrid one mega pseudo patch per package format. Truly masterful, and I get moonlight in the repos as well which rocks my rationale mind.

The desktop itself has some nice tweaks, I like the idea of using the fast user switching applet to do presence and to handle the logout/halt/suspend/hibernate scenerios. I just wish they did that work upstream so that everyone would benefit from looking at the design and applying. It is though a very nice idea and it works really well with Empathy. I do lack the option to set some predefined custom states such as “Having dinner” and such. There is the risk of growing this list very long if one was to do this though.

I hate Launchpad marginally less now, I still think that it is confusing and dead hard to use but somehow work gets done. It needs to be orders of magnitude easier to use before I beats bugzilla though. In the same sense I really miss an easy overview on a per package basis of all the bugs, like bugz.fedoraproject.org/<packagename>. It makes it much easier to do what I love, namely breaking software and triaging bugs, in an effective manner.

Suspend just works… most of the time, I have gotten the system into a state where the network driver never regained life and other little wringles but overall it is the first time I have seen suspend work consistently on this laptop. I hope the same is the case for other people so that one day we might rely universally on this technology to suspend machines when they are idle. If wake up could be made really quick perhaps a system as envisioned by OLPC that would suspend the machine while reading a website might be a viable future for us all.

I am still not sold on the per home directory encryption and it does worry me that I have yet to see any evaluation of this technology by a 3rd party security expert for flaws. It is appealing to have security that does not require every user of a machine to know the master password to boot it yet still have the advantage of knowing that while you are not logged in your data remains safe. It also does not encumber boot nor imparts the performance overhead to system binaries that full disk encryption would do, which is another appealing idea. I would like to have a more informed opinion on the design before I judging one way or the other. It worries me that I have not been able to find a wiki page listing the known weaknesses in this approach, it is not enabled by default but it would still be nice to be able to look up more information. Personally since my laptop is used only by me, I used the alternative CD to install and used dm-crypt, then added this on top, mostly “because I could”, surprisingly the performance overhead of doing this was very low. I think what worries me is that it seems like such a finely pick solution that does the best from a user point of view that it really has to have problems from a security point of view – experience tells most people that when sounds to good to be true, it very likely is.

A problem that seems to plague all Linux desktop right now on this laptop is that it takes very little to make it lock up for seconds or minutes. Audio stutters when the slightest load comes along. It didn’t used to do this but looking at the cpu scaling the slightest load seems to cause a problem where it instantly lowest the cpu speed to the lowest setting. I am currently unaware of what is going on and I don’t have another machine to confirm that it isn’t just this machine going tits up. Ubuntu sadly is affected as well, I won’t deduct them any points but it does make Linux as a desktop very painful on the whole.

Jaunty is an excellent desktop I would not hesitate to recommend it to people, out of the box you get a lot of very nice functionality and a very polished look and feel. It does somehow feel like it is the end of the line for the current Ubuntu desktop and that their experiments with new UI elements will have to lead to some major changes. Hopefully they will be able to pipe this into the GNOME 3 process in a standardized manner so to avoid basically forking the desktop.

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