Published on
October 27, 2008 in
Linux, Microsoft, Technology and slug.
Tags: 8.04, Linux, Microsoft, slug, ubuntu, Vista, Windows, wubi.
I just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04_1 LTS on a friends computer. They have had enough with Windows inparticularly Vista. The installation went smoothly. No hiccups from the wubi installer. In no time my friend had ubuntu up and running, and boy she loved it. She adapted easily to gnome the desktop, found OpenOfiice 2.4 easy to use and was using firefox 3 to do her browsing.
So phase one is now complete. She plans on spending the next couple of months getting use to the environment and is willing to put in the time to save her multiple hours she would have lost on Vista.
Phase two will be a complete removal of Vista. Running XP in a virtual machine for must have software.
Last week receive a letter from my real estate agent (who couldn’t give a rats ass about tenants). Well they decided to up our rent from $335 to $350. Funny thing is rents are starting to go down in our area. I can now get a couple of different brick houses to rent between $300 and $330. I was hoping that this letter would provide some relief to our rental situation. Well it looks like the Landlord is on a money hunger fest to satisfy his greed. He seems to have enough money to throw around and L.J. Hooker seems to be the most overpriced out of all the agents. They must have excessive fees for the Landlord.
Well L.J Hooker we have had enough of your profitering and Sam he can try and get some other sucker to pay an unrealistic over priced rent on his dodgy fibro property. We are getting ready to leave. Thanks to Kevin Rudd and the financial handout for the kids, we can leave this dump.
For those who know me in the community; I’m not one to change once I found something I like and am also comfortable with. For me this was KDE 3.5 from .5 to .9 release updates. With the decision from my distribution of choice to switch over to the latest implementation of KDE4 4.1.2 I decided that it was now time to switch desktops. The main reason is, I don’t see KDE 4 is currently at a place where I can say that I would be able to comfortably use on a daily basis, as well as the KDE4 extras are still being finished like Amarok, Konversation, Kaffeine. Now overall my distro has done a great job out of all distros, but KDE4 is still not for me at the moment.
So now over to Gnome 2.24, which since I last used it for a while has greatly improved and now has very similar features to what KDE 3.5.5 use to have. The gnome team have done an excellent job as well.
For browsers I still use Firefox 3.0.3, but Ephiphany seems to me more feature rich than Konqueror on KDE4. I can use Java and Flash plugins with much more ease. Ephiphany displays the online list on facebook which would not show on Konqueror. Maybe I was missing a plugin for Konqueror. It just didn’t work for me.
Nautilus I have adapted to quite easily. I don’t find it much different to the old Konqueror on KDE 3.5.9 except opening network samba shares was slightly different as it didnt always open the domain or host to view the shares. I had to type the url in manually. But most features are almost identical. It didnt take me long to get used the interface and navigate through different settings and menu’s.
Instead of installing Amarok for KDE 3.5.10 I decided to go with Banshee 1.2.1 ( I decided this over Rhythmbox as I consider it to be quite lame). Banshee features are nice and not to different to that of Amarok. It also has an Itunes like feel to it. I was able to add my media and listen in no time. I didn’t miss Amarok at all.
For instant messenging I am now using pdigin over Kopete and for IRC, X chat over Konversation. My wife did miss Kopete though. But we all must adapt.
Now for the Desktop. It took a bit of getting use too. The menues and windows in a seemed to spread more across the desktop in a flat 2 Dimensional way. I found this even if I removed one of the panels. I did miss a little how KDE used Kdesktop to set things up. It just felt more smoother to me. I also found the desktop look to me more flatter than on KDE 3.5.9. The Ia Ora theme did improve this over the default Gnome theme. I suppose with a bit more playing around with themes I can get more bling.
So for now I will stick with my new Gnome 2.24 desktop. After 4 days I have adapted nicely. I can now do everything I did in KDE. I also opted to not even install any KDE 3.5.10 applications. Gnome will now be my desktop at least for the next six months.
TIme to celebrate.
For those who are now on Mandriva 2009.0.
My latest personal build for Icepodder for Mandriva 2009.0.
It is a simple aggregator and feeds are easily added. The Icepodder team have removed a lot of the old dependencies; pyxmms, python, libxml2.python. Updated from wxgtk2.6 to wxPythonGTK 2.8.
RPM: Mandriva 2009.0 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 68
SRPM: Mandriva 2009.0 Icepodder 5.4 personal build revision 68 source
