Today’s date is Thursday, April 24th, 2008. That means that today is the day that Ubuntu 8.04 is released. At the time of writing this, Ubuntus own page hasn’t yet been updated to reflect that so hold off downloading for a while until it’s been updated.

I’ve been running the 64-bit version of Hardy on my workstation for the past month or so, and it’s the best so far. Because that’s what Linux is, small but steady improvements. I’ve read a lot of comments on the net saying that they’re always disappointed that there’s never any huge improvements in each new version of Ubuntu, and compares it with Windows who introduces a lot of new flair.

Unfortunately, what they forget to factor in is that Ubuntu ships a new version every six months. That is twelve (12!!) releases for the time it took to finish Vista. Consider again that each new version of Ubuntu contains myriads of improvements - some small, some big - and Windows just looks plain silly. The only really new improvement Vista brought over XP was a flashier interface.

I recommend everyone to download it and try it. It won’t cost you more than a CD-R and some time.

There are however a few issues for me left from when I earlier wrote about Hardy. Pretty much all of them have been fixed, except for

* I’m still not completely happy with btnx, and evdev seems to be broken still. After some fiddling with it, researching it a bit more and generally spending slightly more time than ten seconds thinking about it, I discovered that a minor bit of tweaking was needed. Just point evdev at the right device and it works fine. Sidescroll works fine now, but I need to figure out a way to reverse it - right now it scrolls right when you punch left and so on. Btnx is history for me.

(it should be noted though that this might be residual annoyance since my Hardy-installation started life as Alpha6, and it might be some old configuration that lurks beneath the surface)

* Flash has issues. I realized how Flash is implemented in the 64-bit version, it’s simply a 64-bit wrapper around the regular 32-bit Flash binary. This is an ugly hack, and the wrapper has a tendency to lock up every now and again. It should be pointed out though that this is not Ubuntus fault - it’s Adobes, for insisting on not releasing a 64-bit Flash for Linux.

* I don’t know if Ubuntu has updated it’s proprietary driver-manager to support newer Nvidia-cards such as the 9xxx-series. I know the driver supporting them is still in Beta, so it might not be supported by the easy click-and-say-yes method Ubuntu has. This means that owners of 9xxx-cards (including myself) have to visit Nvidias site and install it the old-fashioned method. This is quite user-unfriendly, but again, blame Nvidia and not Ubuntu. I don’t know if the famous Envy-script supports installing the drivers for 9xxx-series cards since I’ve never used it.

Here’s two screenshots for you. The top is a standard desktop, the bottom is the exposé-like view featuring the “curved” option enabled. I think it’s pretty.

UPDATE: The official page has been updated. Grab your copy from the download page.

Yeah, keen observers might note that I’ve removed the “Ubuntu Linux” page from my blog.

Why?

Well, I realized that it was futile to try to have a static page about such a fast-moving target. By the time I’m even close to getting around to finishing it a new version of Ubuntu has been released, and the cycle starts over again.

Instead I’m going to write a static page about Ubuntu, I’m going to some day create a static page about my thoughts on Free Software, Linux and that stuff. For Ubuntu-related news you’ll simply have to read the blog instead. Or search it.

In two days Hardy Heron is officially released. It’s a bit obvious saying this, but so far it’s the best yet. I roll my eyes a bit when I read about how people try it and are disappointed that the changes aren’t as big as they expected. Well, that’s how Linux works. Small, but constant and never-ending improvements - unlike Windows who builds a hype-machine for five years and then falls flat on it’s face since it’s essentially the same stuff as before.

The other day Gartner published a warning that Windows will collapse unless something dramatic is done on Microsofts part.

Let me correct that statement: Windows has been collapsing for years, and Microsoft knows it. They also know that they’re screwed either way, and have so far been sticking their heads in the sand trying to ignore reality.

See, regardless of what Microsoft tries to tell you, they’re selling a product that is a legacy-system. They retired most of the Windows 95-codebase after Windows ME proved to be a spectacular failure in every department, but most of Windows XP, Windows 2000 and I would assume quite a lot of Windows Vista’s collective codebases date back more than a decade, back to Windows NT.

Since 2001 when Windows XP was launched, every release since then has basically just been another spit-n-shine polish of the old Windows NT-codebase. Sure, they’ve tacked on some new bits, but the core dates back to around 1996. Don’t be fooled by Vista either, even though Microsoft likes to hint at Vista being a complete rewrite (thus attempting to explain away the extended birthing process) it isn’t. It’s another legacy-OS dressed up with new clothing.

Windows has been falling apart for a decade. The only thing it’s really bored into peoples consciousness is that Windows is unreliable. By extension, this has caused a deep, almost subconscious feeling in the human population that computers are unreliable regardless of what system they’re running.

What Gartner suggests is that Microsoft is going to have to do a complete overhaul of the Windows codebase, or face complete and utter failure in every department. They point to the extended process behind Vista combined with it’s failure to live up to the hype as reasons why this is needed. Vista took a long time to develop. A long, long, long time. It required at least one complete restart of the project (that we know of, there might be others that Microsoft is black-bagging) and yet the reception to the new version can’t be described as anything more than lukewarm. And I’m being somewhat generous in that description.

Why did Vista take so long to produce? Simple. The codebase has become an unmaintainable jungle, and every effort to make it straighten up and fly right is failing. This is also reflected in Vistas much less than stellar performance. Even on powerful computers it limps along and is having a hard time keeping up with it’s much older cousin Windows XP.

Additionally, while a lot of people are quick to defend Microsoft using Windows XP’s success as an example, we need to remember what Windows XP was like when it was young. It was a temperamental beast lacking most of the hype that we were promised. Sure, it didn’t take six years to reach the market. But it took six years and thousands of patches, driver updates and general tweaking to get it to where it is today. It’ll probably take another six years of applying tough love to Vista to get it even remotely into shape.

“Why yes, this is the size of the Windows codebase!”

So, suppose that Microsoft actually bites the bullet and decides to overhaul Windows. It will take them years upon years to rebuild a new codebase that comes even close to delivering what people are expecting these days.

Apple is a good example of what Microsoft is going to have to do. Apples MacOS was failing miserably when it depended on the legacy of what’s now called MacOS Classic. Versions 8 and 9 were miserable and not well-received by the users. Apple did bite the bullet and did a complete overhaul of MacOS. It took a long time, a lot of work, and a lot of inventiveness but Apple now has an operating system that is flexible, robust, well-performing and scalable. All the things that Windows badly needs. MacOS can be scaled down to run on a cellphone, and it can be scaled up to run on supercomputers.

— Lots of semi-technical mumbo-jumbo starts here—

Along the road Apple had to make a lot of tough choices. Not too long ago there was an uproar about how Adobe isn’t going to ship a 64-bit Photoshop-version for Mac. This has it’s base in Apple deciding to not support Carbon, the API that Adobe has used to make Photoshop under OS X, in 64-bit environments. Carbon is one of the five API’s in OS X, and it was originally only meant as a transitional API. This was since a lot of companies (including Adobe) complained about having to port their existing codebase to Cocoa, the preferred API in OS X. Thus, Carbon was born, with the intention of retiring it when companies had gotten their codebases up to speed. Adobe never bothered, and now that Carbon is becoming history, Adobe has to rewrite Photoshop to use Cocoa in order to produce a long-awaited 64-bit version of Photoshop, which they originally should’ve done years ago. Apple made a tough choice deciding not to support Carbon under 64-bit systems, but it’ll be a choice that will prove fortuitous in the long run.

(Disclaimer: I’m not an Apple, Photoshop, OS X, Carbon/Cocoa or Adobe-expert. So any errors are simply my own)

— Lots of semi-technical mumbo-jumbo ends here—

This is a much simplifed example of one tough choice Apple had to make. Apple realized they’d had to do a complete overhaul, or go under when the ship sank. Microsoft is going to have to do the same thing - a complete rebirth of Windows with a brand-new codebase and a completely new approach to operating systems. They can no longer rely on their old codebase.

The difference here is that Microsoft will probably be screwed no matter what they do. If they decide to do a complete rewrite there will probably be at least a decade before we see a new Windows. Even then I doubt it will be a mature product. Think of it as being in a car-crash, damaging your brain and then having to learn to walk all over again. That’s what Microsoft is going to have to do. They can no longer rely on their previous knowledge (i.e. codebase) and will have to start from scratch.

Apple didn’t really have anything to lose. Instead they had everything to win by doing this. In 1997-1998, Apple was a dying company, desperately trying to find their way again. Microsoft on the other hand has everything to lose, and very little to gain. While they’re busy re-creating Windows from scratch they will lose customers. Apple is coming strong, with fairly innovative and high-quality products, at least considering they’re a corporation with profit-margins. On the other side of the forest are the hungry Free/Open Source systems. Linux is just as scalable, powerful and flexible as OS X - if not more. The big difference is that anyone can install Linux, without paying a dime, and without annoyances common in the Microsoft-sphere. No viruses, no firewalls, no rootkits, no NSA-backdoors into your computer, no EULAs and no trouble.

On the other hand, if Microsoft insists on continuing to re-use the existing Windows-codebase the problems will persist. Windows of the future will be an even worse, virus-infected, unstable thing. Microsoft will spend billions of dollars trying to reign in their legacy-code, spend fortunes trying to get it under control - and fail spectacularly.

Microsoft is damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Either way, I think that the future of software and computing will be radically different.

I’m an active member of Seti@home, running the BOINC-client on both the server powering this website as well as my workstation.

The software for crunching these numbers is quite good, but there’s one thing I really miss - the ability to specify idle-time for each core.

As it is, I run Seti on three of my four cores. Unfortunately, it’s all or nothing. I wish there was a way to specify that BOINC uses, say, one core while the computer is active, and when I’m gone and I don’t care about fan-noise and such it uses all three cores alloted to it.

Currently there’s no way of doing that. At least not as far as I know. Now it’s either being annoyed by the CPU-fan while working, or wasting valuable CPU-cycles waiting for the system to go idle.

Although I suppose a third solution would be to buy a better CPU-cooler. I’m running the stock AMD-cooler that came with the processor, and while it’s virtually inaudible it gets rather noisy when the temperature goes up. Right this second it’s spinning at 4500 rpm and sounds a bit like a polish vacuum-cleaner.

—

Secondly, I’m not particularly amused by Wordpress 2.5. Yeah, it’s nice and all, but there are a few things that annoy me and that I hope will be corrected in Wordpress 2.5.1

1) There’s no “save and continue editing”-button. Either you wait for it to automatically save your post so you can preview it, or you save it and get dumped into a preview.

When I blog I like to have the preview open in one Firefox-tab and the editor in another. In previous versions this allowed me to quickly edit and preview posts. With 2.5 there’s a lot of shuffling in and out of the admin-interface.

2) The new image/media-uploader is a little confusing. While I greatly welcome the capability to upload multiple files, as well as having more options for thumbnailing, I do find the interface rather confusing.

3) The admin-interface is pretty. But when writing I feel that it was a dumb thing to move categories and such down below the post-field. Several times I’ve forgotten about checking the categories for a post, and had to edit it immediately afterwards. Instead of having it down there, why not use all the whitespace to the right and put it there, like in previous versions?

I thought up a tricky question for myself. It’s a doozy, and there’s really no good answer to it.

But I asked myself, if I had to decide on the one thing I dislike the most about Microsoft, what would that be?

There’s a lot of things I dislike about Microsoft. Tons of it. If I made a “top ten list of things I think sucks about the beast in Redmond” it wouldn’t be a top-ten list. It’d be more like a top one-hundred list. And even then I’d not manage to fully divulge my distaste for the Borg Collective.

But deciding on just one thing, now that’s tricky. The winner. Numero uno. The big enchilada.

I might say that their products are crap. But that’s a bit like saying the sky is blue or water is wet. It’s kinda redundant. I could say that every time Bill Gates says something, his smug voice makes me want to puke all over him. But that’s more a personal opinion rather than something profoundly sucky. He just happens to have a really annoying voice.

I might point out their predatory, extend-and-embrace practices, their gobbling up of smaller, more inventive companies who we never hear from again. I could point out Microsofts constant dropping of the ball, and always being four or five years late for the party yet pouring money all over everything and suddenly making it seem like they were the hosts of the party to begin with.

Again though, that’s really just stating the obvious.

No, if I have to decide on the one thing that really irks me the most about the Borg Collective, it would be that they for some reason always manage to sell The Next Big Thing rather than some real product.

Last night I was having a hard time falling asleep, and as is customary with me then I start thinking. Roughly 98% of the thoughts sloshing around inside my head are essentially brainfarts, but every once in a while something insightful comes along and shines a light.

Last night I was thinking of that bloated monstrosity Microsoft calls “Vista”. Don’t ask me why I was thinking about it, I can’t give a good answer to that. But while I was lying there in my bed I realized that Microsoft will use their oldest, most trusted tactic to make money off of Vista, even though it was dead on arrival, and even though nothing seems to change this.

This tactic can be summed up in one sentence.

“The next version will fix everything that’s wrong with this one”

That, my friends, is Microsofts oldest and most reliable sales-method. For more than a decade and a half they’ve managed to use this method to sell shitty, proprietary software to a lot of people. They’ve essentially been using it at the very least since the late 80’s. Probably even from the very start of Microsoft.

And when you think of it, it’s actually quite brilliant. No other industry on the face of the planet can use this method.

“Oh, sorry about the explosion in your brand-new car, the one that killed your wife and both your kids. Don’t worry though, the next version will fix that!”

or

“Oops, your house burned down. Well, just have fun in that tent until we release Home 2.0 and then you can pay through your nose to buy the same dang thing all over again!”

If any car-dealer or homebuilder tried that they’d find themselves dangling from the nearest tree. But Microsoft can do it. Microsoft is indirectly acceptable for people losing everything from photos of their kids to data worth millions of dollars every day. Yet they somehow manage to sell the next version even though it’s still vaporware.

Compare Vista with what’s currently known as Windows 7. Windows 7 is the term being bandied about the playground as the next version of Windows. Microsoft makes some very generous claims that it will be out next year and it will be awesome! At least, that’s if you listen to the honeydew that Microsoft pours into your ears.

Vista has floundered in pretty much every area it’s been introduced to. Corporations have wrinkled their nose at it, since it requires a lot of work and a lot of investment in new computers, despite not actually doing anything that corporations need. In fact, Vista is a dead fish as far as most coporations are concerned. XP does most of what they need (i.e. run Office) and that doesn’t warrant an upgrade.

A lot of Joe Generic computer-users out there in the world is rejecting it as well. Even a lot of diehard Microsoft-fanboys are being rather vocal about their less than stellar experiences with Vista. It’s been reported that Vista is a failure compared to what Microsoft was projecting about a year and a half ago. Back then, Vista was the best thing since pre-sliced bread. Now, it’s lying there on the floor, gasping for air.

Which brings me to Windows 7. Of course, it will be named something else when/if it’s released, but for a codename it’s easily the unsexiest ever. Hell, even Vistas codename (Longhorn) was better.

Have you all noticed how Microsoft are revving up their sales-dachshunds and having them yap about Windows 7? I have. And I think Microsoft has opened their vault and brought out ye olde “The Next Version Will Be Awesome!”-sales pitch. Windows 7 is going to be everything that Vista wasn’t. It’s going to be leaner, meaner, modular and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.

Whenever I see Microsoft using this technique I somehow wonder if I’m the only sane person in a world gone mad. Am I the only one who has this sneaking suspicion that everything Microsoft produces is intentionally broken, so that they can use this sales-pitch to stay in business? Of course, it’s in a corporations least interest to actually sell products that never wear out, and Microsoft is doing exactly this in the software industry. But it amazes me how everyone has been criticizing their products for seemingly eons, yet when Microsoft shakes The New And Improved Product in their face they can’t open their wallets fast enough.

Why?

Because the Next Version Will Be Perfect.

And so on, and so forth unto infinity. Everyone keeps Bill Gates bank-account well and inflated, while using products that are defective by design.

One of the things that upgrading my computer brought with it was the capability to once again play games. Describing me as a casual gamer is very spot-on, with some weighting on the casual since it’s much rarer to find me gaming these days than before. There’s very few games who catch my interest, and I have a tendency to lose that interest quickly. Ask any of my friends who’s the first one to bail out of multiplayer-games and most of them will point at me.

None the less, I looked forward to being able to try a few of the current games. I have a very loose grasp of what’s current, but I knew that Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 were high up on the list. I also remembered that Bioshock had gotten good reviews and decided to try it as well.

Bioshock was in my opinion very impressive. UT3 is pretty much what could be expected. Crysis on the other hand is without a doubt the biggest disappointment in many years.

Sure, I’ll give praise where praise is due. Visually Crysis is spectacular. The graphics-engine is nothing short of amazing. It will require a quite powerful machine, but if you have one then it will deliver. If you want to impress your friends, Crysis will do nicely. Sound is also pretty good, but it can’t match the visual Wow-factor.

Everything else however, is in my opinion pathetically poor.

The story starts off good enough. In a not too distant future you as a member of an elite search & rescue operation gets sent to a tropical paradise to extract a few archeologists who’ve gotten run over by North Korean army. You discover after a while that something isn’t right, and the archeological dig turns out to be something else. In fact, it turns out to be some kind of alien machine-civilization thingamajig that runs amok and you alone stand between it and the rest of the earth.

The first part of the game is quite cool. Your suit has various neat functions, such as increasing your speed, making you less vulnerable to gunfire, making you stronger or even turning you invisible. Each function has advantages and drawbacks. For example, when in Strong-mode you’re incredibly slow, and in Speed-mode you’re vulnerable to gunfire. When you’re invisible you can’t fire your gun or your cloak will disappear. And so on, and so forth.

Utilizing these functions to outwit and outgun the Korean military is fun. Sneaking around the bushes using a sniper-rifle to pick off targets is fun.

But as soon as the alien crap starts everything that makes the game fun disappears, and instead it mutates into a beautiful but boring twitch-shooter. All the things that made the game impressive in the first part simply become irrelevant. The excellent AI that powers the Korean soldiers disappear, since the aliens will mindlessly attack until you kill them. Whichever mode your suit is in doesn’t matter, and the only thing that matters is how many bullets you can fire at whatever is attacking you. It becomes boring and repetitive, and whatever shred of story exists simply fades into the background.

A good single-player game needs a good story. Fabulous visuals are no compensation for a thin storyline, and Crysis is an excellent example of this. It starts off great, but it doesn’t take long for whatever sanity to completely disappear.

Adding insult to injury it’s ridiculously difficult. I played the game on “Normal” difficulty, and quickly found that I’d have to getting used to trying up to ten-fifteen times before managing something. Some parts of the game are so amazingly difficult that it boggles my mind. Sure, there’s probably tons of Counter-Strike junkies who will get a huge kick out of this, but I’m tired of games who punish my persistence by slapping me in the face all the time. Half-Life 2 was a good example of how difficulty should be set - it provided a challenge, not a chore. After a while Crysis became a chore, it became work. Just plough trough it and maybe it ends some time.

I’m disappointed. I really wanted to like this game. I liked Far Cry, even though it also descended into silliness and provided a half-assed ending. Crysis is even worse. Some things in the story just doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell did Prophet go off on his own, and how the heck did he manage to survive a NUCLEAR MISSILE? The cutscenes become boring after a while, since most of the plot is so amazingly dumb. The gung-ho admiral in charge of the aircraft carrier is a walking cliché. He does something that everyone including the player KNOWS is wrong, and after that the game gets turned into a search-for-the-key-then-defeat-the-end-boss nonsense. The ending itself isn’t an ending. It’s just a cut, while Crytek assembles the addon/sequel. You’re playing the game and then BAM, credits roll.

There’s tons of minor annoyances as well. Why do you get a gun that won’t function until later in the game? There’s no explanation, no nothing. It just doesn’t work until after a certain point, and even then it’s no fun. At this stage Crysis has all the thoughtfulness of an 80’s arcade-shooter. You have to find the “weak points” and finding them simply consists of either shooting wildly or dying. Considering the ludicrous difficulty, the latter is something you’ll do often. Enjoy that quick-load button, you’re gonna get really friendly with it.

No, the first part of the game was fun, and it was fun using the suit and admiring the visuals. After a certain point it just becomes a monotonous shoot-em-up that would make the original Doom seem like a masterfully crafted play.

Bioshock on the other hand was awesome in my opinion. It does everything right that Crysis does wrong, and is equally spectacular in the visuals department since it uses the Unreal3-engine. It’s an entertaining plot, with intrigue and drama and a plot-twist. Add to this the heavy influences of roleplaying that Bioshock has.

So in summary this game is essentially Paris Hilton. It’s pretty to look at and fun to goof off with, but after the first few minutes the prettiness wears off and the conversation becomes stale and monotonous.

I really shouldn’t be sitting here blogging about Linux, but instead get my lazy ass into the kitchen and doing the damn dishes. I’m excellent at procrastinating, so sue me.

Last night I had bit of a hard time falling asleep, and as is fairly common these days my brain goes into a maelstrom of thoughts. One that slightly coherent thought was “I should blog about Hardy” and then my mind fell back into chaos for another twenty minutes before I finally fell under the spell of morpheus.

So, what are my thoughts on the upcoming version of Ubuntu? Mostly they can be summed up with “more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff”.

I’ve been running Hardy as my current desktop since upgrading my machine. Right after the upgrade I modified my current Gutsy-install to work with the new hardware, but I think I broke something in it and it started acting funky after a while. It didn’t want to play nice with my new graphics-card (BFG Geforce 9600GT) since it’s so new that Nvidia still haven’t gotten their Linux-drivers for it out of beta. This meant I had to install the driver the manual way, and also meant surgically removing some bits of Gutsy that otherwise would’ve conflicted with the new driver. I suppose that somewhere along the line my wild flailing broke something, and after a quick backup I decided to start fresh.

The Gutsy live-cd wouldn’t play nice either, and I felt that it was kind of bass-ackwards to install Gutsy just to upgrade it in a month or so. Thus, I went for the then-current Alpha6 of Hardy. Since then it’s gone into beta, so if you download it now it will be of that quality from the start and then get updated as you go along.

Installation went fine, it used the VESA-driver for the live-cd portion. I also went for the 64-bit version since I now have a CPU capable of those extensions. I had heard that there would be some issues, but I forged ahead boldly and decided that I’d have to figure out those issues as I went along. What does not kill you instead makes you stronger, right?

After some minor tweaking it was up and running. Still no Ubuntu-support for the 9600GT so I installed the drivers manually from Nvidia. Pretty simple for me, but newbies will definitely get confused by this.

Let’s break down my experience of Hardy. Remember that I installed Alpha6 of it, and I’ve applied updates for it since then so now my installation is “beta-quality”.

* GDM would consume a lot of CPU (a lot, as in 100% of one of my four cores) after logging in, and generally the system would become jerky and somewhat unresponsive. Logging out and back in solved this, but it was definitely an irritation. It has now disappeared after several updates.

* PulseAudio would sometimes lock up and die. This would bring Rhythmbox down as well. Restarting the PA-daemon would solve this until it crashed once again. This is no longer an issue and PulseAudio plays well.

* Unlike Feisty and Gutsy my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS is now capable of genuine 5.1 Dolby Digital-surround. For some reason this never worked under Feisty and Gutsy (but did under Edgy!) and I could never figure out why.

* Some of my regular apps aren’t supported under the 64-bit arch, but I simply compiled them from source instead. This might change in the future.

* Setting up evdev for complete support of my Logitech MX1000 proved to be futile. Apparently a lot of things regarding hotplug and evdev has changed since Gutsy, and most of it is unfortunately poorly documented. Previously I had set up my mouse with a pretty arcane mix of evdev and xbindkeys but this wouldn’t play well under Hardy. Instead I discovered btnx which is a lot smoother to set up. Again, I had to compile this from source since there was no native 64-bit binary in the repos. A nice side-effect of this was that I didn’t have to mess around with my xorg.conf since btnx has a GUI, albeit somewhat obtuse.

* Flash actually worked out of the box. I had previously heard horror-stories about having to install a 32-bit Firefox in order to get Flash working since Adobe doesn’t provide a 64-bit version of Flash. This worked out of the box, no funky installs needed or anything. I haven’t investigated why, if Adobe decided to release a 64-bit version of Flash (highly doubtful) or if Canonical/Ubuntu does some impressive voodoo to get it all working (much more likely).

* Firefox 3 is faaaaast. At first I found it confusing and annoying, and most of my extensions wouldn’t work. Beta 4 of FF3 is included in the current Hardy, and it’s actually quite nice now that I’ve gotten used to it. Some extensions I like worked, others could be hacked to fool them into working. Some that got hacked made FF3 kinda funky and had to be uninstalled. Never the less, FF3 is very, very fast compared to FF2 .

* For whatever reasons Conky refuses to read sensor-readings from LM-sensors. Even though they’re set up correctly and reporting values Conky refuses to display them. I have no idea why, Conky doesn’t give any errors or anything. This led to me doing a bit of soul-searching and ultimately deciding that I didn’t like Conky any more, since it didn’t give me any information I couldn’t find out through a terminal (which I always keep open) and also it forces me to minimize whatever windows I have open. So bye-bye Conky, it was fun while it lasted.

* Gnome 2.22 is a much nicer experience due to myriads of minor touch-ups. The file/open/save/whetever dialogs are much nicer. Click on a picture and it automatically displays a thumbnail of that picture, rather than forcing you to remember a filename. Panels slide into view after login, and when dragging icons they are now completely alpha-transparent so you can actually see where you’re dragging and dropping them. Nautilus now detects the contents of memory-cards and give well-meaning suggestions as to what to do with it. There are no huge differences, but there’s several minor and they make Gnome so much nicer to work with.

* Compiz Fusion 0.7.whatever is included and there’s a few new neat effects to dazzle your friends with. Some of them are pure eyecandy, some of them are quite useful, a lot of them are both or neither. It’s all up to you to decide what you want to enable.

* Several minor touches such as a prettier login-screen and a slightly fresher default theme help to make Hardy a bit more polished. First I thought it was a bit sad that the brand-new theme got delayed until Ubuntu 8.10 but since I’ve never used the default Ubuntu theme it was a pretty minor point.

* Installing the Konica-Minolta color-laser we have was a bit less painful than before. It pretty much autodetected, but I had to install the m2300w package in order to get the proper driver, since it defaulted to text-only. Other things that get plugged into the computer is detected automagically and work just fine, this includes my Wacom-tablet.

* For whatever reason the splashscreen doesn’t work. This is no longer true, at least not for me. The other night I decided to see if it had changed (since among several updates then was included an update to usplash), enabled splash and rebooted. Lo and behold, it worked.

—

Hardy gets released on April 24th and I think it will be interesting. I’m not going to proclaim any huge revolutionary inroads to the world of Windows, but I think Ubuntu is a pretty solid distribution. Sure, there were some issues with the Alpha6, but they’ve all disappeared with the updates and as far as I’m concerned my Hardy-installation is solid.

One thing though that constantly irks me with Linux is the sound-support. It’s nice seeing Hardy dropping the ancient ESD in favor of PulseAudio, but I still think that sound-support under Linux could use some serious cleaning-up. It’s a bit confusing with two different architectures (ALSA and the now obsolete OSS) providing the base, and then on top of that have to wonder about sound-daemons and sinks and such. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m essentially talking out of my ass since I’m not a developer and have no deep insights into the inner workings of the OS, but as a user I find it somewhat confusing - and I’m not a greenhorn! PulseAudio is neat, providing drop-in replacement for ESD (the Enlightened Sound Daemon, which hasn’t been developed since frickin’ 2001, so it was about time that it got shelved!) and also adding some neat tricks such as the ability to send sound over a network to another computer running PulseAudio.

If there’s any questions about Hardy I will do my best to try to answer them, but remember that I’m just a user and not a developer or in any way a part of the creation-process.

UPDATE 080331: I added a point of contention.

(Warning: This is a very, very, very geeky article. Do not read if you’re not a hard-core computer nerd)

I was sitting just a few minutes ago, idly surfing the intarweb. Milling around inside my head was various threads and yarns, and out of the chaos I realized that by all measures and means, Apple is the last real proprietary UNIX-vendor.

There was a time when proprietary UNIX’es ruled the kingdom of serious computing-use. This was back when the only real supercomputers came from Cray, the only real graphics workstation were badged Silicon Graphics and when the must-have UNIX workstations with almost complete certainty came from Sun Microsystems.

This was also back when Linux was in its infancy (or not even born at all), when GNU still was unknown territory to all but the most die-hard enthusiasts, back when Macs still were considered desktop-publishing machines.

It’s ironic how things have changed a decade or two later. Silicon Graphics renamed themselves SGI and then started flapping about like a fish out of water when regular beige PC’s started having enough power to be a competitor. Cray still exists, but have been made a margin-player by companies such as IBM and (ironically) SGI using what is basically regular PC’s in clustered modes running Linux and Open-Source Software. Sun seemed to be floundering as well, but rather than trying to fight for a dying market they adapted. First by changing their hardware around, and later by opening up their operating system as well as opening up Java.

Apple however did the biggest change. In acquiring NeXT back in 1997 they not only got The Steve back to One Infinite Loop, they also acquired an operating system with heavy roots in proprietary UNIX. NeXTstep, later known as OpenStep, which later became the foundation of MacOS X. Don’t be fooled by it’s pretty aesthetics, it’s solidly UNIX in the bottom. Admittedly, it’s not 100% proprietary in the same way that IRIX (which was the UNIX-flavor that Silicon Graphics pushed) was proprietary, but none the less it’s a lot more proprietary than most other free UNIXish operating systems around today.

I remember when I was a young nerd. I lusted for those horribly expensive but very powerful proprietary UNIX-boxes. When other teenagers had half-naked models on their walls, I had a poster from Sun, proclaiming their then-current slogan “the network is the computer”. I still think it’s a great slogan though.

My first real exposure to something of that magnitude was a Sun Ultra 1 back in 1997 or so. I of course had toyed with various free UNIX-like systems such as Linux and BSD’s, but Solaris was my first real exposure to a proprietary system. I came to a realization then, that proprietary UNIX’es were powerful in the sense that a Formula 1-car is powerful. It’s been designed for a pretty narrow field of operation, and is very good at it, but in regular handling it’s quite over-engineered and to most people quite useless.

Since then I’ve had plenty of time to play with alternative operating systems. I’ve played with IRIX, the proprietary system used on older Silicon Graphics-machines. If you’ve ever seen the first Jurassic Park, then you’ve seen the funky filemanager that was included as a kind of joke. I’ve played with that, and it’s quite useless. I’ve ran systems from Sun, both on regular old x86-hardware as well as SPARC. I’ve run NeXTstep/OpenStep. I’ve also tried the legendary and rather obscure BeOS. I’ve telnetted into various VAXen and I’ve even touched (as in physically putting my hand on it, since it was non-functioning at the time) a PDP-7, the computer system that the original UNIX was developed on. Note to other nerds, it wasn’t _THE_ PDP-7, just one of them.

So, again. I find it somewhat amusing and ironic that Apple remains as the only vendor of what could be called a proprietary UNIX. Sure, it’s not completely proprietary since most of it’s underpinnings come from the world of BSD and is called Darwin, but Apple guards OS X many secrets closely, and this is what I feel qualifies it for the label of “proprietary UNIX”.

So, the other day I was playing Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Excellent continuation of one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve had a blast playing it so far.

Anyhoo. There’s a segment where Gordon (i.e. You) need to go through a lot of stuff to get to a car. The car is needed for the next part of the game. I went through that whole level and finally found the car.

When I found it I did a bit of a double-take. It looked oddly familiar. In fact, upon closer inspection it was quite clear why it looked so darn familiar. It was a Charger! As you can see from the screenshots down below it’s essentially a heap of junk, barely recognizable. But that rear end and the headlights are a dead giveaway. It’s definitely one of the original B-body chargers, judging from the brakelights and split grille a 1969 model.

(Click the images for full-sized screenshots)

It was a while since I wrote anything about computers, so I guess it’s about time I got back to being white and nerdy.

Fairly recently I had the good fortune of being able to upgrade my aging and ailing computer. Even though it has served me well for almost a half decade (!) it started to show some cracks in the makeup. Often it had problems booting. Disturbingly often I was met with a black screen when I turned it on, only hearing the fans spin up but nothing more. Sometimes it would restart itself, usually when I was asleep but also sometimes when I was using it. Add to this that pretty much every time I turned it on I had to restore my BIOS-settings since the motherboard interpreted these false-starts as a problem and reset the bios to default, safe values.

It was no surprise that the computer needed upgrading, something that I originally had put off. My original plan was to flat-out refuse to upgrade my computer until I could afford a Mac. This turned out to be a bit unrealistic, and since being Windows-free for a year sorted out my biggest desire to get a Mac (i.e., not having to deal with Windows) I thought that maybe an upgrade of my PC was in order anyways.

Additionally, you get an almost silly amount of computing power for relatively small sums of money these days.

My new components got ordered and arrived a few days later. I went for an AMD Phenom, 4GB of RAM, a BFG Geforce 9600GT and stuck it all on a nice new shiny Gigabyte-motherboard. The Phenom is a quad-core processor, meaning it’s essentially four processors on one chip. I also knew about the so-called TLB-bug which AMD disclosed a while ago, and even though less levelheaded people than me were screaming bloody murder I felt that the hoopla was greatly exaggerated. So far I haven’t had any issues that I directly can relate to the TLB-thing, and I’m running my computer with the bios-fix for it disabled.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this.

Since I now had a rather nice machine I felt that it would be wasted if I didn’t try out the current crop of games. That meant installing Windows, which I somewhat reluctantly did on a separate harddrive. It went as well as could be expected, and once it was installed I got heavily reminded of one of the reasons why I really, really dislike Windows as a concept and as an operating system:

As a user you have no control other than what Microsoft decides to give you. Even that little control is unreliable and not something to count on.

One of the games I wanted to try out was the new SimCity game. I installed it, and when I tried starting it nothing happened. No error message, no crash-report. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Void. Null. It was as if I’d never clicked the icon.

And I had no way of figuring out what was wrong, because Windows intentionally limits the amount of control you as a user have over your own computer. You have literally no way of figuring out what’s happening behind the scenes of that awful GUI that Microsoft insisted Windows XP needed to have.

In Linux it’s easy. You run the app from a terminal, and it will output what’s going on. If it dies, you can use this to figure out why the app crashed, or even why it didn’t start at all. The same method in Windows will give you nothing.

Another fun moment is when that fullscreen game dies on you. It just freezes, and you sit staring at a pretty yet dead screen. What now? Yeah, normally you would press ctrl-alt-delete to bring up the task manager, but this is a broken method and doesn’t always work. Sometimes Windows just refuses to let this method work, for whatever reasons it might have. The only thing to do then is reach over and press that nice little reset-button on your computer. Then you can feel your life drain away while Windows does scandisking all the while accusing you of not shutting your computer down properly, don’t you know that you should always shut your computer down properly, you silly little user?

In Linux, the GUI is called X11, or X for short. When an application makes X freeze (yes, it happens even under Linux that apps crash or freeze) what do you do? You press control-alt-backspace and X restarts. That’s it. No cold reboots of your computer. No bad sectors on your harddrive. No hidden accusations that you’re a dumb person who needs to be punished.

And, if the worst of the worst happens and the ctrl-alt-backspace thing doesn’t work there’s always a fool-proof way of safely restarting your computer without resorting to pressing the reset-button. This method is called the Magic SysRq-Key and is a part of Linux since several years.

The magic-what key?

Take a gander at your keyboard. You will most likely find it above the number-keypad to the right. It’s labeled “Print Screen” and underneath that label is the second label: SysRq. Most computer users will agree that it’s probably the most useless button on the keybard. Well, at least until Linux found a use for it.

The story behind SysRq is somewhat convoluted. The version I’ve heard was that in the mid-80’s when IBM reigned supreme over the PC market together with Microsoft, Microsoft was planning for a new version of DOS. Apparently this version was going to be the coolest thing since sliced bread, and Microsoft insisted that IBM put an extra key on the keyboard to fully comply with all the awesomeness they were going to put in this new version of DOS. IBM complied and added the SysRq (short for presumably “System Request”). As for that legendary version of DOS that supposedly would change the way we compute… well… the world is still waiting for it.

Linux uses the SysRq-key in a very neat way. It allows you to send low-level commands straight to the kernel. These can be a variety of things, such as telling your computer to unmount all filesystems, ask all running processes to shutdown nicely, or to tell the computer to restart or shut itself down. Harnessing the power of the SysRq-key means a Linux-user will never have a corrupt filesystem, since even if everything he or she sees locks up, the SysRq-key will always obey the commands it is given.

Windows has nothing like this.

When the fecal matter has hit the oscillating unit in Windows, that’s were you’re stuck. Either that or pressing reset and getting implied that you’re a substandard human being who can’t even handle the most basic procedures of computing.

The control you have over Windows is an illusion. It’s a gilded cage without any real control, other than the control you have over the reset-button. When applications fail there’s no way of finding out what’s wrong except to be a programmer and have some complicated set of debugging gear running. Even then there’s no guarantee you’ll figure out what’s wrong.

I resolved my SimCity-issues. How? By completely uninstalling the game, making sure there were no traces of it left anywhere, then reinstalling it. I did this three times and finally it worked. I don’t know what changed, but something did and now it works. I most likely have no way of finding out either what was causing it.