Canllaith.org

Yet another ‘wow, I can’t believe how awesome Linux is getting’ post.

I went over to a friend’s place tonight to give her a hand configuring her Kubuntu laptop. In the time we’ve known each other she’s reinstalled Kubuntu a few times now, mostly to upgrade to new versions cleanly as she uses a lot of manual configuration that doesn’t survive a dist-upgrade well.

We’ve noticed it getting just a little bit easier with every new version, but tonight on installing ndiswrapper something she said reminded me that a long time ago, I’d written an article about ndiswrapper in the Bad Old Days of doing just about everything by hand. I poked around on the webserver I used to host my things on and it seems it’s still there.

We had a bit of fun browsing through my baby steps in Linux - I’m embarrassed to admit I used to think those little w3m ‘Compliant HTML!’ buttons were cool, and that I used to write HTML tables by hand because at that stage I couldn’t figure out CSS. Moving right along now.

The thing that really struck us going through all these old how to’s though is how markedly they show the improvement in ease of use over the last few years. All of the tutorials describe editing configuration files by hand, compiling kernels and other software by source and even writing custom init scripts for hardware.

Now, installing Kubuntu on my friend’s laptop is the work of a pleasant hour while sitting on the couch chatting. The only thing that isn’t picked up automatically is the Synaptics touchpad and the BCM4318 wireless card. One quick edit to the Xorg.conf and a little bit of fiddling with ndiswrapper (which goes much quicker when I don’t accidentally set the wireless switch to off! Go Jes!) and away we go - and this is on problematic SIS chipsets, about the least Linux compatible laptop I’ve ever seen. On Intel hardware, it pretty much JustWorks.

The attitudes have changed a lot too lately. Now it’s just terrible if I can’t get beryl’s 3d effects working right or my plug-and-play dual head configuration occasionally has a glitch. I almost feel guilty complaining about it when I look back on having to spend 3 days compiling just to get online.

I think I’m getting a bit spoilt :)

Tonight was pretty exciting for me - my first ever lunar eclipse. It was absolutely freezing and very windy but completely worth every moment of discomfort. Of course, we did it the geek way - with every possible gadget.

Me wearing every article of clothing I own, or at least it felt like it.

Next time, I am taking a thermos of hot milo and some handwarmers. My partner made the romantic comment that someone, somewhere, was probably being thrown into a volcano as a sacrifice to appease the moon god. We then did a little moon dance ourselves, and took some photographs.

Then it was back off home for hot soy milk with dark chocolate stirred through to get the blood flowing again. If I walk out onto my balcony I can see the moon still, heavy and dark and somehow more like a sphere than I’ve ever seen it before.

Linux has gotten So. Damn. Cool.

The end result of my Dell fiasco is that I threw a tantrum, demanded a refund, and marched down to my local Sony store to buy their similar product. I’m now the proud owner of a Sony Vaio SZ. Sony haven’t been known for their Linux compatible machines in the past, but these days if you pick a machine with mostly Intel components at least you know there are good Linux drivers for them.

I had some pretty stringent requirements for this machine. It needed to be able to be docked and undocked many times a day from a docking station with very little fuss, preferably being able to switch between dual monitor and single without needing to restart Xorg. I wasn’t even sure if this could really be done - it’s been a while since I used dual monitors under Linux.

I am extremely impressed with the current NVidia drivers and *buntu Fiesty. I can put the laptop on or off the docking station as I please, and all of the devices happily disconnect and connect themselves at the right times without anything getting upset at being yanked away from the laptop. The last time I tried a docking station with a laptop was a few months ago with a Lenovo X40, and it used to kernel panic every time I tried to undock it.

The excellence of the current NVidia driver is what’s really blown me away though. I dropped the laptop on the docking station and connected my external panel up to the DVI port and then ran nvidia-settings. I could immediatley see that it had detected the monitor, so I selected it and clicked to enable Twin View.

I almost fell off my chair when it worked.

I didn’t have to restart Xorg or fiddle with any settings manually - it truly JustWorked the way one expects a modern desktop would. About an hour later I had a meeting to go to - I (a little nervously) pulled my laptop off the docking station and pulled up nvidia-settings again to disable the second display. All of the windows that were open on my external display trotted back to the main one and everything was rosy.

When I came back from my meeting and enabled the second display again, windows that had previously been on the external display appeared back there. It was very, very nicely done and I’m very very impressed.

So, that’s two Sony Vaio machines I’ve bought recently that have worked excellently with Linux. I think it’s my new favourite brand :)

(I still have the itty bitty guy - he’s just not powerful enough to run all the vmware I have to run at work :()

This evening I spent a few hours at the Gadget, Games & Geeks techfest at a conference centre near my work. Hosted by Unlimited Potential and NZWireless, it’s a little mini conference with some displays and a few talks, a bit of social networking and a few drinks and some nibblies.

There was not as much gadgets as I’d hoped for - I got to have a look at an Apple TV and some fancy blackberry acessories as well as completely failing to win an Apple iPod. The talks were quite good, a bit of food for thought - although I did have a moment of irritation during a talk given by a representative of a company that develops games. In the question and answer session a woman asked him about women gamers - and he managed to bring up the women = ‘casual non-gamers who might like something like a wii’ stereotype AND mention barbie games in the same paragraph. Sure, plenty of women probably do like that sort of thing - but it’s an insult to girl gamers to suggest that ‘real’ women gamers don’t exist.

There was also an interesting presentation on Open Solaris - looks like it’s going to interesting places. I’d like to have a play with ZFS.

Afterwards, it was lovely catered food and a bit of milling about. I had an interesting chat with someone from a recruitment firm at the state of the market at the moment - and then it was off home to look up the interesting websites that had been brought up in presentations.

All in all a fun evening.

Or perhaps shame on me, for being fooled a second time.

I not-so-recently ordered a Dell M1330, on the 2nd of July (it launched on the 1st.) It’s a really sweet looking laptop - 13.3″ gaming ultraportable with fantastic specs and a great price. Finally, one machine that could do everything I wanted - game, be thin and light and have decent battery life, and be powerful enough to use for work as well.

It was supposed to ship on the 16th of July. I found out by logging into the website only a few days before the intended shipping date that the laptop was going to be delayed until the 7th of August. I sent a pretty cranky email to Dell asking them why this happened - surely they’d know it wasn’t shipping on the date they’d originally specified far earlier than 2 days before hand, couldn’t they have let me know?

I’ve been waiting fairly patiently for it to arrive on the 7th. I received a phone call from a Dell representative a day ago informing me that they’re still on track and my machine is still arriving on the 7th.

I logged into the website this evening and it told me it was pushed back until the 21st. What on earth? How could they not have known about this yesterday when they rang me and blatantly lied about my ship date? I bet there are a lot of people very cranky with Dell right now - the M1330 had a lot of people eagerly waiting for it and so far I don’t think anyone world-wide has received one yet despite the estimated shipping date for the first orders being the 10th of July.

No more Dell for me. I’m getting a refund and marching down to my local Sony store, or possibly the Apple store. At least if I buy something off the shelf I wont have my money floating in limbo for a few months.

## EDIT

Amusingly I had forgotten that I was going to be reviewing the unit for Linux Journal. Way to miss out on some good press, Dell!

I wonder if my editor would let me change it to a very short ‘I would love to be reviewing the M1330 right now but Dell loses at customer service’ rant if I didn’t charge ;)