Ubuntu 9.10 what is all the griping about?

We mostly use debian linux at the monkey house, but some ubuntu for an Pentium 2 (very old) and a remix based on ubuntu (this will become debian though) on a rather nice netbook.

Since the netbook is moving from ubuntu that only left the pentiom 2 pc to upgrade.

Being that this machine is very old it did take 12 twelve hours (on a slow net connection doing too much other stuff) but you could not run windows 7 on it (windows nt, or windows 98 was what the maker supplied it with ten years plus ago.)  Before i resort to some low power distro like damm small linux it still makes a good x host and is ok for spreadsheets and basic tasks.

I’d go use latest debian on it except the sound card isnt supported and to get that back into the kernel requires some plain damm strange magic linux backport stuff that never works when i do it (early etch worked fine)

So the machine does struggle a bit with 9.04, and things do take a bit of time on this old machine but it still has a use in it still with a rather good flat screen display.

Testing of 9.10 indicated most things working except than the x test card test, I had to re-enable the switches on cups to get remote printers to be seen and printed too. That took a minute to fi

The only mickey mouse feature in 9.10 is no gdm screen (on first look)  anyhow quite sure i can live with that for a while until i fix that.

So when people say it karmic koala sucks it does not – try running windows 7 on a Pentium 2, it was pretty awful with windows xp and how long ago did xp come out ?

One happy koala user here.

I mean whats the fuss about ? Im happy with it. Humans sigh

omg Ugly hag – age 13 (Sasha 11 update)

ooh dear bleeched hair -  orginal post (my blog) no geek im sure.

Sally (the ape of the mind) will be muttering to the bananas about this,

Humans…..

 

V (the remake) and why you avoid it

Read this, the conclusion is wait for the movie/film, sorry tv you got played (my blog).

battlestar:The Plan

Awful (and that’s from a fan of the reimaged tv series), mind you i did not like razor either.

0/5 bananas,

Mr Olmos (whose project it is) should be ‘reminded‘ that knowing everything makes for a boring life, for instance whatever Kara Thrace was*, and quite how things became means sometimes its nice to think for oneself.

* plaything,human,guide,spirit etc

Amusing for halloween

Unseen academicals

is isbn: 9780385609340 and by Terry Prachett. It is his first post Alzheimer announcement book in the discworld universe – although whether it is an adult or child version is something i  did not know until reading it (a useful idea in a series like his).

I suppose it is an adult discworld title and it finally explains the cyptic remark about local journalists not beng able to cover the football match on saturday.

Theres a lot of characters in this book, but they do wonder in and out of focus about the development of a sport.  The running jokes wax and wane accordingly and being a subject (football/rugby) i don’t particularly like makes it not one of the better discworld books.

Its full on multicultural message also got a little tiresome, however it has bananas in. and an ape.

A wondering 2/5 bananas.

Niall Connolly is a hero

Behold the dirty dealings of local ‘democracies’ http://muckandbrass.blogspot.com. It is interesting to see how the msm (including the bbc) demonize him – . some local journalist was not doing there job.

The bbc should be minded that local issues matter to some who may not be reporters. and so Niall Connolly deserves some kudos and karma,

Amazon kindle rewrites books now too

Oh the joys of drm, and copyright lawyers. Moral: dont buy a kindle or from amazon

Regcure from Paretologic the latest thing making microsoft usuable

I was called out of the monkey house to fix our professors computer who’s exploits have been mentioned in this blog.  We have computers running linux and so the world of windows vista always brings weirdness to our day should it invade it compared with our serene peace we have with our computers.

Vista and windows 7 needs a hefty computer to run it, and not that long ago professor  bought a new dell pc (ready for vista) and got mind fucked by all and sundry converting an old pc from xp to vista it’s detailed here (my blog).

Quite how he gets a machine that could run about 500 nasa spacecraft to the moon at once and make crawl is something i find amusing, this has been achieved in various ways including with three firewalls just so your ’safe’. This computer also connects via a router, so a firewall is not really necessary anyhow.

Its been a while since i have been to professors office, and the thing that was out-of-place was something called regcure which i had never even bothered to even know existed until yesterday (linux does not have a registry).

Naturally something else was not working and even HP could not get there usb thing to perform which he paid them to do and probably the reason for the visit.

So this state of the art pc was running v e  r  y  s l o w l y, no programs were loaded on startup, networking and getting a wired dhcp lease took three minutes, loading any program took forever while i assume regcure did some paranoid checking

Heres the thing while im sure regcure is probably ok but  in the hands of an idiot its downright dangerous – and professor had no clue how or who and why installed it for him.

So after fixing a few things and installing sp2 on vista, and the hp device, i decided to dump regcure.  five or ten reboots (we don’t do that in linux very often) later and networking was faster, and programs actually loaded more speedily.

So to all you microsoft windows experts (yes even you msm computer  magazine journalists*) who think windows is amazing please don’t recommend this crap since i have to clean it off.

Its not my job to worry that a reg entry without anything in it (eg blank) is my problem, i didnt compile the crap and so i have no idea if i could break x.exe by doing so. Take the hp device drivers if they are so bad for vista that they need constant re-installing then any Microsoft operating system is doomed to be fucked about by ‘experts like regcure’ that make windows o/s’s a joke where it works it’s a bloody miracle.

Humans.

* windows 8 needs pimping

Dollhouse – finally gets interesting.

be carefull what you wish for

Dollhouse is something that i tolerate and is on television.  It has had an iffy start, subject to vagueness of people who would not know how to put a tv show together when the people making it are not up to the job in some strange world called tv executive land (search this blog for further musings).

Getting a second season was even touch and go but my intolerance to tv executives who think they can make tv has resulted in some nice episodes by the people who really make it.

These are very much in the minority, but it appears theres life to be found here after all.