Monday, October 24, 2005

I was reading this, which pointed to this at work. Being partially sighted, I have a CCTV system on my desk. SO, I put something I printed from the colour laser printer underneath and cranked up the magnification.


The system had a hard time finding something to focus on, but eventually would setlle down, and right enough: there are little yellow dots. If I had a UV light, I'm sure they would be much easier to see, but they were viewable.

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Hoary is dead - long live Breezy!

Ubuntu Linux have recently released their next version - this time nicknamed "Breezy Badger". I have installed it on my laptop and so far I like it a lot. They have a lot of the toys I like, and even some bleeding edge stuff.


Here are a few of my first impressions:


1. I like the inclusion of some zeroconf stuff. Unfortunately this laptop is the only thing that can do it at the moment. I will need to upgrade a couple of other computers to see how well it works. I spose another alternative is to hang around a few Macs and see what happens.


2. Beagle works well - better than I could ever get it to work by just compiling the code. This makes me think that the package maintainer did a lot more than just compile the code. There is also a preference applet to go with it. It seems to be a bit disconnected from beagle - and it does not start beagled for you.


3. My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad. Ubuntu said they had done a lot of work to improve things for laptops. I can see they have - my laptop now hibernates! However, we still have the usual Thinkpad grumbles of PCMCIA screwing things up, and sound not working after waking up. I think that is a hardware thing. On the whole I am pleased.


4. they have included this new toy called the "Deskbar Applet". It sits on your panel and you can type a word or phrase into it. It then presents you with a list of places where it can search for you. It includes beagle, all your search things in Firefox, and more. It then presents the results in the appropriate application. This is my kinda toy.


So, on the whole, I am liking Breezy a lot. There are bound to be some annoyances, so I might post a follow up later.