Planetary Ponderings

With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10 there has been a spate of negative publicity for this latest release, with a lot of people bemoaning broken upgrades and various other installation issues. Having only had 1 failure out of 7 upgrades, I thought I'd blog about my experience with the upgrade, and my thoughts on the new version of Kubuntu (since that's the particular flavour of Ubuntu that I use).

Recently I've been having some issues with sound in Linux. With writing OpenLP in PyQt4, we're using Phonon for audio and video output. However, to get a video to output to 2 displays at the same time, you have to use the GStreamer backend for Phonon.

That's all great, except that installing the GStreamer backend pulled in GStreamer (of course), which then pulled in PulseAudio. And PulseAudio killed my sound.

As you might have read in my previous blog post, my computer died the other day, and I've been going through the process of geting new hardware.

On Wednesday evening I searched through the product listings on the sites of local computer dealers, and on Thursday I placed my order for a new motherboard, graphics card, case (with PSU) and processor (my existing hard drive was quite new, and the motherboard contains all the other things like LAN and sound card).

I got home last night and tried to switch on my PC, and it didn't want to boot up. So I restarted it, and continued trying to get it to boot for an hour, but I eventually gave up. My PC has been giving me problems recently (not booting up), so this was not completely unexpected. However, I hadn't expected it to happen so soon.

Well my review finally when live today. It's a printer review with a difference... it's reviewed on Linux. I have a Windows computer at home that I log onto every now and then for developing openlp.org, but for this review I was determined not to go there. I was largely pleased with the printer, but you can read more about it in my review on IOL Technology.

The ichthux.com site has been down for months due to the fact that the server it was hosted on crashed and died a horrible death. Every now and then we'd get folks in the #ichthux channel asking, "Is the project dead? Cause the web site seems to be..."

So I decided last week to do something about it, and I took over the running of the website. Fortunately, Raphaël had managed to retrieve the data from the DB, and I was able to stick it on my development server at home and build the site up again.

I've been given a printer to review, one of these fancy printer/scanner/copier jobs, with photo-quality printing. Big printer, but it looks nice... all black...

Obviously I'm going to check that it works well with Linux. I have a Windows box to fall back on if necessary, but we'll see. Which brings me to my first issue...

Anyone who uses Kubuntu will know that Firefox looks absolutely awful in KDE. Recently my friend Richard tipped me off on a way to make Firefox (and other GTK applications) really look like a KDE application. Here's how...

So I did say I was going to both blog about my installation of the Huawei E272 and then post it on the CLUG wiki. My apologies for not having done this sooner, I've had a few other things on my plate.

Please update your Linux version. I don't run an rpm-based distro (indeed, the most popular distro for the last 3 or 4 years has been Ubuntu, a deb-based distro), and the 2.4 Linux kernel was thrown out with the rest of the cruft years ago.

Thanks.

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