Er, kindof anyway. My old Enovation desk just got showcased on Desked:
Archives for March 2009
Goodbye Kubuntu, thou foul and fickle temptress. Hello faithful Debian, thy time come round again…
After the debacle that was the attempted upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, I sat back and thought about using Ubuntu for a while. In fact, I’d been thinking about it when I wrote the blog post on the upgrade. And the conclusion I came to was this; I started using Linux with Debian, way back in the days when 3.0 was in testing; I used it on my desktop, on my laptops, on my robot, on the lab server and anywhere else it could fit; and I stayed with it up to the point where I needed some hardware support and was too lazy to build from source, and tried Ubuntu because “all the cool kids were doing it”.
And that was a bad mistake. They may bar me ever re-uping with SAGE for saying something as basic as this in public, but stability is far more important than having the suspend-to-ram function working or faster graphics regardless of whether it’s a mainframe or a laptop, if that is, you’re actually doing work with your computer. I did know that at one point. I blame reading too many Rails sites 
At any rate, plugged in the external 1394 hard drive, backed up everything (~50Gb in under an hour, sweet), stuck in the netinst cd for Debian Lenny’s amd64 version (feck it, if it didn’t install, I had the i386 handy as a fallback), walked through an incredibly improved installer process, and now I have a pristine system running Gnome, KDE (3), Openbox, Windowmaker, XFCE, LXDE and matchbox (for a project).
The only nonstandard thing in here is that I went and got the 1.2.1 version of Mercurial from the testing repository by hand because otherwise it wouldn’t hg pull from the 1.2.1 repos in the lab.
It’s … Read the rest
Disasterous Kubuntu Hardy upgrade to Intrepid
What *bangs head on desk* was *bang* I *bang* thinking?
I tried KDE4 before, I didn’t like it. I downgraded back to KDE3 just to get something that worked. I know my new toy upgraded to Intrepid without problems, but that was running Xubuntu, not KDE, so why did I think that a quick apt-get dist-upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10 was going to work on the machine I have all my precious, precious data on?
Irish telephony costs
You know, most folks think we’re pretty expensive as places to get a telephone line go. The thing is, they’re wrong.
Turns out we’re the most expensive. Of any country in the world. Great thing to say about a country where the internet is fairly critical for the economy…
From Ireland Offline…
Fujitsiu LT C-500 touchscreen in Ubuntu
Just as a small note to anyone trying to get this to work, the fpit driver has a bug in every version of ubuntu up to and including hardy; upgrade to intrepid and you get fully a functional touchscreen again, using this xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "touchscreen"
Driver "fpit"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS1"
Option "BaudRate" "9600"
Option "MaximumXPosition" "4096"
Option "MaximumYPosition" "4096"
Option "MinimumXPosition" "0"
Option "MinimumYPosition" "0"
Option "Passive"
Option "SendCoreEvents"
Option "TrackRandR" "true"
EndSection
Just don’t try using KDE4 unless slow-motion work sounds appealing XFCE is reasonable though, so Xubuntu is an option (and what I’m running on it right now).
Now, on with the PyQT4 coding…
