Archive for December, 2006

At the moment both my desktop and laptop run Gentoo Linux. It’s a fine OS and it’s been the longest running Linux distro I’ve had, but it takes a lot of effort to keep it up to date. Over time I’ve used my desktop less and less for work, to the point it’s really just a media server. Since it hasn’t been used for much, I haven’t kept it up to date, and it’s still awaiting the split-X upgrade, and now the gcc 4.11 upgrade. I don’t want to do them again, I’ve done them on my laptop and they take a long time, and there’s always something that needs fixing at the end. So I figure it’s time to try out something a little more low maintenance, enter Kubuntu.

I’ve had some experience with Ubuntu before, and it’s pretty pain-free, providing you don’t mix and match your source lists too much, all too common when you want to try some new version of a package. I downloaded a copy of Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, which is the latest development version, so strictly speaking you shouldn’t use it as your current desktop OS, but I don’t plan to upgrade for a short while so I just wanted to give it a test run.

N.B. This was done with the live CD rather than doing an install.

Startup

Overall pretty good, it did try to use an unsupported video mode between the original boot menu and X, but I just sat it out and it was fine. It brought up X and found the network.

X

X did start up and was working but still needed some configuration to get to a decent state. It had chosen the highest resolution possible, which meant a low refresh rate, I had to copy over my old settings to get it the way I liked it. I was surprised to see an option to change the resolution and refresh rate in KDE control center, but these had no effect besides restarting X. It also setup a US keyboard, so that needed changing.

Other Hardware

It didn’t detect my printer, but I’m still using the parallel port, so fair enough. More annoyingly it didn’t create any mount points for my hard drives and DVD drive, so I had to do this for myself.

Multimedia

Since the main purpose of the box will be to serve media files, this is an important area. Sounds works fine, so we were off to a good start, but that’s where it ended. There’s a definite lack of multimedia software with Kubuntu, namely:

• mplayer
• freevo
• mythtv
• Any UPnP AV servers (mediatomb, ushare, etc.)

The only media player was Kaffeine and when it started, it complained about various things, e.g. missing Win32 codecs, insufficient permissions to read /dev/dvd, not great. The lack of codecs was a real problem. Most files couldn’t play (duh, they’re avi files!), but also some mpegs lacked sound.

That’s where my first adventure into Kunbuntu ended. The appeal of apt-get is a strong one, so I think it’ll continue, I just need to find a source list that will give me multimedia love I crave. If I can get that sorted and setup a CUPS and Samba server, it might be time to retire one of the older Gentoo installations out there.

I just came across a free fax by email service from TPC. It looks like it’s been going for a long time. Very handy when you come across a company who doesn’t have an email address or phone number!

I just came across this post. It looks like there’s talk to introduce special operators for getters and setters in Java 7! The following two lines might be equivalent:

a.setFoo(b.getFoo());
a->Foo = b->Foo;

See page 27 of this PDF.

It’s just so wrong to me. The problem only exists because field access is done by static type, if they did the same lookup as they do for methods, we could just use ‘.’. If you wanted to do something different in a setter or a getter, then you could explicitly write a method.

The suggestions on page 28 make more sense, e.g. String support in switch blocks, and comparison operators for enums. But why not just give us generic support? Why can’t I use any object in a switch statement? Surely it could just invoke equals()? Similarly give me the chance to define what -> means, or add comparison operator support to any class I want. Then I wouldn’t mind stupid things like ->, but this whole, some objects are more equal than others thing when it comes to operators, and stupid operator definitions, that I can’t abide!