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After being a little disappointed with Kubuntu Edgy, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Feisty on my VAIO. I have been very impressed with some of the changes evident so far.

At the moment Feisty is using the Polyester theme by default and it looks great. Very glossy and shiny without being too heavy. Knetworkmanager has been updated and now has the option to configure static addresses as well as being a little more reliable. Nice work!

The main reason I was less than thrilled with Edgy was that both suspend-to-ram and hibernate were broken for me. Not so good. Both seem to be ok in Feisty though. Occasionally my wireless card doesn’t want to come back from suspend-to-ram, but that is a marked improvement over kernel panics. Kubuntu’s Guidance power management tool also has some great improvements - It is now capable of setting the cpufreq policy on plug/unplug events, and setting actions for other events. For example, you are now able to set the machine to suspend when you close the lid.

It wasn’t all roses though - the Ubuntu installer was a nightmare. I most certainly did not want it to touch my Windows partition, yet the only options it gave me was to resize my Windows partition, delete it and use the entire disk, or manual partitioning. I had an unused 30GB vfat partition I wanted to delete and then use that space for Feisty. I usually partition manually, but this has to be the worst tool I have ever seen for that process. It forced me to specify partition sizes in bytes, told me perfectly valid sizes were invalid and crashed quite a lot. Finally I chose to partition first with fdisk and then run the installer, and I managed to get there with a minimum of pain. This was an Ubuntu rather than Kubuntu CD though, I hope the Kubuntu installer is a little friendlier.

All up, I am pretty impressed with Feisty. Looks as though it is going to be an extremely polished release.

I am currently writing this post on an interesting new gadget. I got rather sick of always carrying at least three gadgets around (phone, ipaq, mp3 player) and replaced them with a PDA phone instead. It is the i-mate jasjam, affectionately nicknamed jamjar. It is my new best friend. It is just as functional as each of the other devices were separately, and the qwerty keyboard makes it pretty usable for jabber and irc on the move. Indeed, also for typing out long blog posts. It is Windows Mobile, which is probably the only thing to dislike about it, but I am reconciled to it’s operating system every time I leave the house with only my wallet, keys, and my jamjar.

In other much less exciting news, I managed to sprain my back on Friday night. Not all that much fun. Lots of drugs are rendering it bearable, but I recommend that people look after their backs. They suck heaps when they’re unhappy.

Last night I had a really great time attending the first NZ Linux Chix get together. A group of women I used to work with have started our very own Chix chapter (http://linuxchix.org.nz). We met at Butler’s chocolate cafe, who are across the road from my office and have the most amazing chocolates. We then migrated to my favourite cafe, Mojo Invincible, to terrorise the staff and plan our first steps. So far we have a mailing list, planet, a team of very cool chix, interesting plans and for some of us, hangovers. It’s amusing to see people you used to work with so drunk they cannot actually talk coherently. Or at least, one person who I bet is not feeling all that great today.

Looks like we’re going to meet every month for coffee and chocolates and things, and the first event we’re planning is an installfest. Sounds like it’s going to be great, and I’m really pleased and surprised to see how many women are getting involved. It looks to be the start of a really nurturing community.