A Cajun-Asian View

As someone who just upgraded his laptop to Ubuntu 7.10, primarily used Ubuntu linux as my primary desktop O.S. since Dapper was in beta, and utilized Linux O.S. since 1998 as a server, the following quote from Rupert Goodwins blog really says it for me1:

Then how come I'm so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn't succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.

1. 1. Granted, I have limited experiences with Windows Vista, mainly playing with it on a friend's computer. But the quote still highlights what is an important different between close source and open source software are to me in general.

Yeah, I'm a few days late on this. Heck, Dell had launched the systems on Thursday. Actually, this hasn't been too new, as Dell have been selling Red Hat equipped servers for some time (And they even have their own customized Yum repositories for hardware-specific drivers). But this is a very good sign for Linux (and other open source systems) when Dell is willing to sell systems with Ubuntu 7.04 preinstalled!

I had installed PostgreSQL, Apache, and PHP on my laptop (running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy) to aid in development. But when I was attempting to load a copy of the production database into PostgreSQL, it kept giving me errors on setting up the functions. Turns out that PostgreSQL (which I installed with the Ubuntu GUI package system, Synaptic) was expecting a file at /usr/lib/pgsql/plpgsql.so, but the real file was at /usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib/plpgsql.so. In fact, checking the file system, there was no directory called pgsql in /usr/lib. Apparently, there's some kind of bug in the Debian packager.

The quickest fix I determined was to run the following to create a softlink:
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib /usr/lib/pgsql

Now those functions setup without any errors.

The next version of Ubuntu is finally out! Now to download it and check it out on a virtual machine. Later on, I'll attempt to do the upgrade process on the install that's on my main desktop then my laptop.

It also seems the Ubuntu website is getting hit by some pretty serious traffic, so it seems to be switching between a holding page that lists the mirrors that you can download the ISOs from and the original site.

Running Windows XP in a VMware virtual system in Linux. Pretty handy if I need to check a website out in Internet Explorer without having to setup Wine, especially if I already had a copy of Windows XP Pro sitting around gathering dust...

I just decided to use an image that I had found in relation to one of my favorite animes:

Well, as I mentioned earlier, I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft 64-bit version onto my gaming system to see if I can get the Nvidia 8800 GTS card working with it. Since I went that far, I took the tiny extra step and setup Beryl to run on it, and this is the result! It is quite smooth, even with the blurring effects (which do have some buggy artifacts that occur at times. I'm sure that will be worked out over time). Too bad flash doesn't work (Adobe didn't release a 64-bit Flash Player version for Linux), but truthfully, I don't miss it....

Earlier, I had mentioned that I was getting the ZyXEL ZyAIR G-102v2 wireless Cardbus adapter from Newegg.com to see if it will work properly in Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. I have to now report that it does indeed work right out of the box in Ubuntu, complete with WPA2 wireless security. To make wireless support much easier in Ubuntu, I had installed the Network Manager package from the repositories.

Check it out:

The ZyXEL ZyAIR G-102v2 in operation in Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft.

Let's see if this works...