sprocket i/o

Firefox 3.0b4 on Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper)

Now that all of my photos from the Ski Trip and Boston have been posted, I decided to play with some software a bit. Using Mac OS X has been getting boring (everything works, sigh…), so I decided to put some Linux back into my life, among other things. Here are some observations on bleeding-edge software from this weekend.

• WordPress 2.5b1 – Upgraded this blog to the latest code this weekend, and the lack of contrast in the new administration console really puts me off. The write post page seems to waste a lot of screen real estate, but the new featureset looks solid. Best blog software evar. No bugs yet!
• Foresight Linux was pretty disappointing. The current stable release (1.4.2) didn’t support the JMicron PATA chipset in my motherboard. I installed the 1.99 beta onto an external USB drive, but it blew away boot sector on my internal drive, killing my Mac OS X install. It also failed to install grub on itself, so nothing booted. I then tried to install to the internal drive, but it failed to get any further than grubby fatal error: unable to find a suitable template and Operating System Not Found.
• Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Kalyway edition): In order to use my Mac OS X install after my boot blocks were blown away, I had to boot off of the Kalyway DVD. I discovered that the unofficial JMicron drivers that were hacked up for Kalyway are unreliable: If I left the DVD in the drive, I could only muster an hour of uptime before it panic’d. I wonder if they’ve been updated.
• Fedora 9 Alpha: Installs easily, but fails back into the text mode for the install. Not only did it present me with 653 packages that required updates, but it’s 2.6.25 kernel is not compatible with the official ‘nvidia’ drivers. Tried to get dual-head with the nv drivers, but failed. Still ships with broken information for the 23″ Apple Cinema Display that causes a silent failure in system-config-display. I should get this fixed.
• Pixelmator, the $59 image editor I bought in December, still doesn’t support centering text. It’s text support is absolutely abysmal, but it sure is pretty! It’s not beta, but it should be.
• Firefox 3.0b4: My previous beta was getting flakey, so I upgraded to 3.0b4 (on their FTP site). It now requires GTK+ 2.10, which is sad, because Dapper 6.06 (the latest Ubuntu LTS) only includes 2.8.
• Opera 9.50b2 Snapshot: Works great on Linux. I just wish Google Spreadsheets fully supported Opera.
• Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux: I had to use this because the latest Skype for Mac OS X (2.7) doesn’t allow you to set voicemail or call forwarding preferences. I needed to extend how many seconds our home phone would wait before sending a caller to voicemail, and the Linux version handled this without issue.
• Blurb BookSmart 1.9.2: I spent about 4 hours working on our wedding photo album in Booksmart this weekend. It crashed 3-4 times, but thankfully it autosaves after every change, so it was only mildly annoying. Booksmart is actually written in Java, but oddly they only support Mac OS X and Windows. I haven’t tried it, but there is a patch to add Linux support to BookSmart.

Tonight I will likely find myself fighting Fedora 9 some more, and trying OpenSUSE 11.0 Alpha.