I have been amazed at how well Ubuntu works on my laptop (a Dell D430), every device works, I have Compiz on my Intel graphics card, the USB DVD-RW works, the docking station works, all the function keys work, everything works. The only slight niggle was attaching a projector the other day, I had never done dual monitors and Fn-F8 seemed to work but I had to change my screen resolution to match the projectors, I could not get it to work in dual monitor mode (I only tried a few mins as the pressure was on to get an image up)

Ubuntu is Debian. I have said this to people before, possibly to be controversial but I think there is a point to be made. Ubuntu is Debian at least in the way Debian is GNU + Linux + X.org + …, it would not exist without the work of the Debian developers. It is distinct enough that I will never state that identity again, I was over egging the pudding. I like the idea of them selecting a core of packages from Debian testing/unstable, QAing them, adding apps not found in there and tweaking the settings. I spent an awful long time trying to do that single handedly in the past, using apt-pining and loads of 3rd party repos, and it was a pain and certainly not as stable as Ubuntu is. I like that they recompile Debian packages and make them available in Universe and Multiverse, but think they are a bit coy about saying where they come from, “a snapshot of the free world” or something I think they say. I think people perhaps need to be a bit more thoughtful when giving credit, hard work by Debian, the kernel guys, Gnome and pick_your_favorite_app will make Ubuntu look better, as of course will all the good work the Ubuntu guys do. I think I will continue to use Debian stable for servers for some time though, Ubuntu LTS does not seem as safe a bet to me.

Share on Facebook

We use Acrobat in work and don’t get anything like our moneys worth, we basically use it to annotate PDFs that come back from translators and print to PDF. I have used PDFCreator for one of those tasks, but the other is more of a hurdle.

PDF is a pretty good open standard. I would be very glad to see a GPL3 library that fully implements all its features.

Share on Facebook

While I am on the topic of fonts, I must recommend learning LaTeX. If you have ever read a maths or science paper you will recognise the output; beautiful, well structured documents. LaTeX is an extension to TeX, which was created by Donald Knuth as he was unhappy with the quality of maths journals. Checkout AUCTeX and Flyspell (a syntax-aware spellchecker) to more easily create the source files in emacs. For a WYSIWYG tex editor, see TeXmacs. For a WYSIWYM (What you see is what you MEAN) editor, see LyX.

I was looking for a good template to use for a CV, as Jane needs one and I would like to keep mine up to date with things I am currently doing, when I found this advice. I will probably create a LaTeX style using some of the hints there as my current CV was made using some crappy windows software. The site points to quite an interesting article on using type heirachys to show the relative importance of parts of a document, graphic designer types should check out that page as it is pretty interesting.

Share on Facebook

I stumbled across a site that reminded me of when I used to read tomshardware to see how fast new PC parts really were (or look at nice graphs and read a conclusion telling me). Their benchmarks of Ubuntu vs Fedora and The Last 12 Linux Kernels strike me as pretty pointless. Pages of graphs saying things are the same bar noise, as you would probably expect. The conclusion of the distro shootout at least says you should (could?) not base your decision on the results. The Linux one is interesting:

The only benchmark where there was a definitive improvement was with the network performance. Granted, these 12 Linux kernels were only tested on one system and in eight different benchmarks. We will continue benchmarking the Linux kernel in different environments and report back once we have any new findings.

Of all the benchmarks, I would have predicted in advance that the network one would be noisiest. I would suggest that you would get different results on different machines, perhaps they should use different clocks too.

Do these people creating the graphs know about repeating measurements, averaging and statistical significance tests? I think not, so what is the point?

Share on Facebook

That is to say neither the Ubuntu package or the download from the webpage worked for me straight away.

Deluge on the other hand is working a treat though. It’s written for Gnome in C++ and Python so I may be able to get my head around the code too.

Now I can continue downloading more stuff than there is hours in the day to watch it.

Share on Facebook