Mindstab.net

The last day of classes was yesterday. It’s nice to have those all done with. Just finals looming in the next two weeks remain. Then a short break and summer school. But it’s a light load, chemistry and psyc.

So last night I installed Ubuntu’s new release (5.04: Hoary) on my desktop. Was not really impressed. Doesn’t really seem to have any benefits over the last release. I was expecting, for instance, XOrg to work well and have composite working, as I did like 9 months ago on Gentoo, but alas it was all disabled by default, and even when I ran xcompmgr from the console, the desktop was initially covered in video garbage, and though it worked decently, it had show stopping issues like the logout dialog would never appear. Not very polished at all. Gstreamer still fails to even be able to handle dvds, so I’m still stuck with good old reliable xine. It also had wierd audio lag and played videos in a rather jerky fashion. Gnome has upgraded to a new menu spec. Fine, so who cares. Well, menu’s have now regressed to a non editable state. It’s 2005 and I can’t even edit my menu. Also, no head way has been made on the pick a default sound card front. I spent an hour online trying to figure out how to make Ubuntu not use the motherboard’s soundcard as default. I finally went with a hack method of putting the soundblaster module in /etc/modules so it was loaded first when the computer starts. Not very smooth or intuitive for anyone who doesn’t know a bunch about Linux already. Not very noob friendly. Had a hassle getting the right kernel source or header package so that I could compile my webcam’s driver. And once that was done, only gqcam seemed to be able to use it. Gnomemeeting seemed unable to get video from my webcam. Evolution has some new “feature” where the toolbar sits at the top of the screen glued to the panel’s bottom. Really annoying and I couldn’t figure out how to place it back in the main window so I had to turn it off entirely.

That’s mostly it for now, but I was kind of hoping for something a little more polished so I could push this on a bunch of my windows using friends, but this was still decently issue-tastic and still not using a lot of the cool features it could be (composite). I might wait and see how the 05.10 release looks. At least will should run better since a bunch of the GNOME dev’s are on a memory reducing quest. Hopefully over the next few months they’ll also make menu’s editable again, and Ubuntu will sort it self out.

I’m kind of disappointed in this release but I guess that’s what I get for getting my hopes up. I know there is a lot of cool tech and code out there and I wish it was more accesible to non developers. In summery, getting media to a usable state (from configureing video card to finding something to play everything) is still a bitch. Everything else could use a little more polish too.