Stuff that's wrong with my laptop

For the record (my record):

• wireless card (ipw2200) seems to lose connectivity after a certain period of use, never fixed by a module reload, occasionally fixed by a full reboot;
• irssi + screen + gnome-terminal have a well known (informally) bug where they "turn the screen blue" instead of rendering properly, occasionally fixed by detaching and reattaching screen;
• irssi + screen + gnome-terminal have a little known bug — I produce it regularly if not deterministically on multiple machines, noone else has ever heard of it — where the "turn the screen blue" bug also causes gnome-terminal to immediately chew through about a minute's worth of CPU time (causing, as a side effect, my fan to spin up and laptop to heat up noticably); and
• sound doesn't work yet, although having two devices show up in gnome-alsamixer, plus two mics, is confusing me.

For fairness's sake: yay X autodetect, yay, yay, yay!

Python-centric distro

Got a semi-targeted mail from the people who allege they have no name to me in my capacity as maintainer of the defunct Sydney PIG. Glad most distros don't do that. It's the old universalisation problem: if everyone did it, it would definitely be a problem.

Ubuntu Linux

Since Ubuntu Linux has just had a public preview released (ISOs here if the download page still has broken links when you read this) I thought I'd comment on, well, whether or not you'd want to use it.

Point of view: I'm a professional software developer (computer science oriented) with enough sysadmin capabilities to run a home or small office non-critical network. So I'm not your mother or father or whoever it is in your life you use to gauge "is Linux ready for the masses yet?" by. On the other hand I'm notoriously unlucky with hardware and I hate low-level system configuration (like PPP config files) and every time Linux makes me learn a new gotcha these days I get cranky. I have my little tools (mutt, vim, Firefox) that I configure endlessly, but everything else just needs to work.

So with that in mind, here's why you might like Ubuntu if you're someone like me (obviously, if none of this applies to you you'll need to rationalise it yourself):

It's Debian-like. It has apt, aptitude, dpkg. Its universe Archive even has Debian main in it, pretty much. (Technically you aren't meant to Debian sources too, but I've been sneaking contrib and non-free in.)

Except it's going to be released every six months. You will have noticed that that is not how Debian works by now.

It has GNOME 2.8. It is apparently going to track GNOME releases fairly closely in following releases too.

The installer is not yet pretty, but it is simpler. Mind you, Debian's will be soon too. But this installer is pretty step-by-step.

X will be configured for you. Well, most likely it will be. It was for me. And wasn't that lovely after endless years of being asked for my horizontal sync ranges or whatever they are, and never once, during that time, having anyone ever give me a monitor manual.

Some other nice things for me personally were: having the ipw2200 firmware in the kernel distribution; having the first user given sudo access and being put in all the right groups automatically; and... actually I think the rest of it is GNOME 2.8 stuff, like having sftp:// URLs work.

In summary, if you're a desktop Debian user, particularly a GNOME user, Ubuntu is worth looking at.

Rants

1. Wiki markup is great if you only have to learn one version of it. However, there isn't only one version of it, many wikis have their own subtly different form. I don't know why this is upsetting me, I already know about five text markup formats, what's another few matter?
2. Switching hosting providers always lands me with a worse hosting provider. Now that I'm down to 70 or 80% uptime, I'm considering settling.
3. Every serious Free Software Thinker in the world can tell you why they hate every Free(-ish) creative work licence out there. The only two licences that anyone seems happy for creative people to use are the GPL and the BSD licence. Everyone understands code licences and they are good, what hey?
4. Advice sucks. I'm considering adopting a personal philosophy involving only giving people advice in times of an immediate life threatening emergency. I am failing badly.
5. I should never have promised that I'd work on my holiday.

Curiosity

Why are people so keen to pass on GMail invites? I don't recall constantly being asked if I wanted a Livejournal account back in the days when those were invite-only. I keep looking at the invite spooler though; there's something about the graphs. Andrew was really disappointed that they weren't selling them, because he had a Buy-Sell graph nostalgia attack on seeing it.