The Midnight Sun

Category: FOSS

  • Welcome Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot!

    Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot is out! I have used Ubuntu on my laptop since the 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release and every release would get me excited like a kid would on seeing new toys. I would try to do a dist-upgrade or download the ISO image to install it using my USB drive. Ubuntu repositories would be under heavy load and I would egging my package manager to download all the packages faster and faster and it would be well past midnight by the time when I go to bod after I am done with the installation and setup.

    This time things are way better. I already have Ubuntu Oneiric installed on my laptop! 🙂 I am spared of the downloads and the midnight tussles that I had to go through so that my laptop will have a spanking new Ubuntu to use the next day. But all this luxury didn’t come without pain.

    Oneiric Ocelot

     

    When I installed Oneiric Ocelot beta 1 release, the Unity port to Gnome 3 was totally broken and unusable. Most actions done on the desktop would cause Unity, Compiz or some GNOME 3 component to crash. There was also a serious issue of focus change between open windows and the desktop wherein switching between windows was not possible at all.  All I could do with the desktop was to report bugs. There started a marathon of non-stop bug reports and daily updates which were often more than 50 MB in size. I cursed Ubuntu like anything on social networks and had lengthy arguments with my friends over there. I reported more than 50 bugs most of which were centered on Unity and Compiz. There was a provision to install a Classic GNOME fallback mode, but it was more of an emulation layer on top of GNOME 3.x and not a full-fledge GNOME 2.x environment. When I decided to try GNOME shell, I found that it had too many rough edges and wasn’t integrated properly with Ubuntu.

    All this led to a stage where I almost decided to quit Ubuntu for good. But wait, did I have an alternative distro that I could switch to? Nope. Debian and Fedora were the only candidates that I was considering. Being used to the Debian world for so long, Fedora didn’t excite me enough. Debian? Debian would be good, but a lot of effort would be required to get it working with my nVidia graphics card by installing the proprietary drivers. Nouveau is a promising project that aims to provide libre drivers for nVidia, but isn’t fully mature yet and has its share of issues. Also with Debian stable, I would be lagging behind the latest releases of most of the software. I could install “testing” or “sid” if I wanted to live on the bleeding edge, but the experience with Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot beta left me hesitant to proceed in that direction though Debian would be way more stable. So I just decided to wait a bit for the bugs to get fixed and things to improve. Things did improve gradually with the daily updates which some times introduced new bugs. That the Ubuntu team was working in full swing towards a release free of critical and usability bugs was obviously visible while observing the bug transitions and updates. About 2-3 days back, the updates stopped as expected and Oneiric Ocelot was ready to gallop towards today’s grand release. And with today’s release, Ubuntu has succeeded in bringing a very good release that sets an exciting road-map for the upcoming LTS release aptly named “Precise Pangolin” due for release next April. My hearty congratulations to all those who made awesome release possible, contributing in myriad ways.

    Will I try Precise Pangolin in its beta stage? Of course I will 🙂

  • Tremendous growth of GNU/Linux

    I have been GNU/Linux user for the past couple of years and when I look back to see how much it has progressed, I can only gape in awe. I use Ubuntu in my laptop and Debian elsewhere and am familiar with these distros ( I badly want to try RedHat-based distros too! ), still when I came across this page http://bit.ly/6DUUBk which shows the wide range of nice software tools available for Ubuntu 9.10, I was surprised I didn’t know about most of the stuff though I have used Ubuntu for a long time, that too now I was using the latest Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I realized yet again of how little I knew though I often thought too much of myself.

    Whatever software is there for the Windows platform, there are abundant equivalents that are at least as good in FLOSS and GNU/Linux world. There are also software for doing things which are impossible in a Windows environment which is GNU ecosystem’s niche. So am really glad that I got into FLOSS ecosystem and without doubt am benefiting hugely from its tremendous growth.

  • FStival’07!

    Today we celebrated Software Freedom Day in our college. We had a talk on FOSS and GNU/Linux by Mr.Praveen Krishnamoorthy, a FOSS enthusiast and a distinguished alumnus of our college. There was also a demonstration on the installation of Ubuntu Linux by Mahesh of 3rd year and the features of Ubuntu were demonstrated by Mr.Subramani, another alumnus, who along with Mr.Senthil, answered the queries of the audience. We had a T-Shirt designed for this year’s FStival and almost all of the guys involved, wore it.

    Then a lot of students from schools in Madurai and the students from the other department visited the halls in the CSE department where there were demo stalls on various GNU/Linux tools. I, alongwith Venkatachalam and Raju, hosted a stall on LaTeX, a powerful typesetting language. It was fun demoing stalls to the visitors. The other stalls were GIMP by J.Aravind, Krishnakumar, Content Management System by K.Manikandan, Vi by S.Anugraha and co., Blender by Deepika and co., Emacs by M.P.Aravinth and co., and so on. The demo stalls were open for about 2 1/2 hours and then we closed them. My only regret was that I couldn’t visit other stalls.I visited the Blender stall i the midst of an explantion and it was very attractive to me as I was already very much interested in 3d animation and 3Ds max.Even when Blessings came to near my stall, it was about to be closed and I was explaining seriously to seniors visiting my stall and when I was done with it, Blessings was nowhere to be found there.

    When I went to the Microprocessor Lab, Blessings and co., had closed their stall and were leaving. All the other stalls i visited thereafter were closed and I was a bit disappointed as I had thought that the stalls would’ve been open till evening.

    Then we brought back all the computers to the PP lab and connected them. Then we had a photo session with Senthil anna, Bala anna and Ravishankar anna shooting pics with their camera. Then we walked our way out of the college, as a group with a lot of cheerful talking. Today has been an unforgettable day in my life.