Sunday Time-Warner started the cut over from our Comcast service to Roadrunner. Needless to say the service was down when I wanted to use it. Big surprise. Well, I am making this blog entry from home on my Windows machine and all is well. I tested it on my Linux box (Ubuntu 6.06) this morning and all was well. The speeds have been what I expected they would be so I have no complaints...yet. Give me (actually Time-Warner) time and I will have some complaints :) .
My wife and I spent all of Saturday evening watching the first six episodes of "Jericho". I am very impressed so far. Good story line, the acting is s0-s0, but the overt sexual themes are minimal. If you have not seen it...well you have a chance to IF you have a broadband connection. CBS has the episodes streaming from their website to view at your leisure. You better hurry, no one knows how long CBS will keep the up.
I had a slow day at work so I thought I would role my underpowered (500 mhz HP Vectra) to Ubuntu 6.10, code named "Edgy Eft". What should have been a very simple process turned out to be a nightmare. I scrapped that install (Matrox video issues, Firefox that would not install properly, etc) and decided to put it on a Dell Optiplex (733 mhz, 256 RAM) and had pretty good results until I tried to configure it to apt-get through the proxy server at work. That little effort took 2 hours to figure out. I am not stupid, really. I know I needed to modify the /etc/apt/apt.conf file to reflect the firewall, but it seems that UBUNTU suffers from the same problem SuSE Linux has. The GUI overrides what ever is manually entered in the config file (at least in Edgy Eft). Since I could not remember he *exact* syntax for modifying the apf.conf file, I Googled until I found out how. The blog said that I could either make the change via GUI or I could command line it. I tried the GUI first and it did not work, so I decided to do the command line and it did not work. I kept thinking that I was making a typo so I copied a known good apt.conf file from the rogue Ubuntu server we have running (testing it first!) to my newly christened Linux box and ... it failed. I was getting frustrated. I launched the GUI and cleared out the settings, saved the config and then did a sudo apt-get update... viola! It worked! w00t! I was glad I had a slow day at work or I may have never figured this problem out.
Now, will I install Edgy at home? NOPE. Too many little quirks. It has some issues with my KVM switch at work and screen position. I one box (my XP laptop, for example) centered and when I switch over to my Edgy box, it is off center. Center the Edgy box and when I switch over to my XP box, it is off center.
Also, at any given moment a window will just close without any warning at all. This can be a real bummer when browsing web pages. While I use NVidia at home and the fpitiful MGA drivers would not affect me, I am still not happy with this version. If you run Dapper, stick with it if you have older hardware. Trust me.
I have to say that it is shinier than previous releases and boots a bit quicker, but it is not worth putting on old hardware. Maybe I will run it in a VM on my Windows box at work. Maybe not. Now to be fair, I did manage to get it to run (rather well at that) on an old Compaq Presario 500 mhz AMD. It is quite a bit faster and runs IceMW very well.
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