Give a little love for our crocodile loving home-slice Steve Irwin. We’ll miss your silly animal-loving antics that spawned the idea for the super commentary track on my wedding dvd. (BTW, where is that commentary track Rob / Seth / Dirk ?)
If you had bit it crocodile hunter man, there couldn’t be a better way for you leave us unless it was actually by a wound caused by a crocodile.
I might finally finish a big project that has been annoying me for a while at work. It will be my first fairly big redesign and it has taken me over a month to complete. I really want it off my desk once and for all.
My wife started school today, and my printer spontaneously decided to not work for her this morning after I left. Coincidence? I think not. Really, this time I didn’t change anything and could print from it two days ago, so it is something that was actually totally random.
The summer of Linux is no officially complete. What is the verdict?
Linux stays.
Here is the breakdown of the ups and downs.
Ups –
Eye candy. The UI enhancements of XGL/compiz are second to none. If they get the dock plugin working and stable it will blow away OS X and make Windows Vista cry like the whiny bitch it is. Plus, I think if I switch from Xgl on the backend (the part that talks to X windows) to AGLIX I could gain some performance…but I’ll wait for ubuntu 6.10 (also named “edgy eft”…and eft is a baby newt…did you know that?) before I go for that one.
SSH access. I can remotely manage computer problems from home, and work on some projects by forwarding windows to my local machine upstairs. This will be more handy if I ever get a mac which has a native X-server included in it.
Free. I’m no longer stealing any M$ stuff.
Easy to use. I said it, it was simple to use. Setting up printers isn’t hard (except for a lack of driver, as shown below). You can right-click on a folder and share it over the network. The package manger is easy to use once you know what it is (it is a little intimidating to look at at first if you don’t know what it is.). If something (software / background service / etc) crashes, it doesn’t take down the system and can be restarted easily w/o having to shut down the whole computer.
Downs –
Printing. There just aren’t linux drivers out there for printers like there is for windows. Drivers in general haven’t been a major issue for me. My bluetooth worked out of box, but the printer has just been a big issue. I’m told if you have a printer that has a linux driver it works great. I’ve even been able to share the printer using a “RAW” driver (which means it just sends raw data to the printer), and then print from my laptop which has a driver. This works pretty good. It is a little slow though.
File/printer sharing. I know there is a way to make this work better. I think maybe a samba server handling all the WINS or NetBIOS, but for right now and in several other scenarios SAMBA (the linux thing that makes it able to share files with windows and macs over the network) just isn’t as fast or as simple as I would like it to be. It is close, maybe samba4 will be speedier when it comes out.
Ipod. It works, but not completely. I have a hard time writing files to it, but playing from it is fine. I think this is because of my reluctance to use Itunes to put music on it in windows. I just hate Itunes, and as long as Winamp works I’ll keep on that. But I think this confuses the linux programs who try to read the internal ipod database, because they expect it to be populated from itunes. I haven’t bothered to troubleshoot this problem, but I’ve been lazy about it since I can do everything I need to at work.
My phone. There is no Nokia PC suite for my phone on linux. This is a nokia problem, not a linux problem, but it is still annoying.
CD / DVD burning. I haven’t found a cd / dvd burning program I like that runs in Gnome. I hear there is a good one for KDE, but I don’t want to install all the stuff that you need to install to run it. I figure I’ll find one I like eventually.
So, Linux stays on my pc at home, and I think it is ready for a lot more people to use it. The big issues I see are the SAMBA being slow, printer drivers (hp seems to be better about this problem than cannon), and to a lesser extent for many people the ipod issue.