Nebulae Spiral

I’ll be honest about it, probably to my detriment, but I really do like linux.  I like the control I have over my system, the hardware, the kernel.  I like the ease of finding software and serving out content, I like apache, I like MySQL, I heart PHP but…  I especially like the eye candy.  Most of the time I’m running windows, which I like too, don’t get me wrong, more than linux for sheer ease of getting stuff done, be that familiarity or whatever.  They are different animals, maybe from different planets, both have their strengths and both have their flaws. 

I have to admit though, you can no longer complain about usability in linux, not with the ubuntu flavor.  If you are a standard user who wants to surf around, watch flicks, download some music, pron, whatever, you can do it  all just as easily in ubuntu as windows.  If you are a more adventurous user like myself who **needs** to have the pimp eyecandy 6 desktop rotating cube with secondlife on one and tv on the other and tool on the rest… well, thats where I rebooted back to xp.  At least if you know it isnt an option you dont frustrate yourself for hours trying to make it work right :-)  I could never EVER get my video card to work in ubuntu, not without crashing or freezing up or some sort of complaint.  I gave up. 

Turns out 8.10 is out though, so I’m in the middle of upgrading to the latest version of ubuntu, which apparently has those issues fixed in the latest ATI driver.  If this release supports my dual monitor set up – one digital, one VGA – without crashing when I go fullscreen across both of them, and letting me change the order of them would be cool as well –  the screens have been reversed for a few months – If this is as good as windows, well… my dual boot lets me access my windows hard drive and I can watch netflix on tv with my xbox now… I may not have to reboot for quite some time.  Secondlife will be the test.  My avie cannot be jagged, that is so last year.   

19 minutes remaining until installation complete.

building in secondlife is cool.  what is even cooler though is watching what kids build in secondlife.  I was watching my daughter playing on the teen grid the other day and she built this can of rootbeer with lava flowing inside it, bubbling up and out the sides.  it was rad.  Then she built herself a robot avie, and flew around as a big white robotic alien with huge black eyes.  Tres rad.  I was a proud moma.

5 minutes remaining. 

I wonder if anyone has tried to measure remote viewing or other psi phenomenon with people using windows as opposed to people using linux.    If particles and atoms can be influenced by intention, even become entangled, could that not reflect in the software thats written and the intention of the people writing it?  Writing code is not enormously different than writing poetry or painting or sculpting.  You cant deny that the feeling you get from one artists flower compared to another, or a song by the doors or the beatles or tool as compared to britney spears or any of the generic mass produced money-in-mind noise you hear in the top 40 at any given time.  You can feel the ripples of the intention behind it, the energy of the artist can be felt through the art, no? 

Restart system to complete upgrade.

So Ive spent the last half an hour trying to figure out how to get past the “composite extension not available” when activating the advanced desktop effects.  If anyones curious, you need to reconfigure the xserver-xorg settings: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg – once you run through this and it overwrites the previous settings, you can go pack into the advanced appearance settings and activate the super awesome “Extra” effects.  it’ll scan for plug ins and maybe prompt you for something or other, but it’ll work.  apparently xgl is dead, which makes me smile just a smidge because that was a problem for me before. 

run aticonfig and set the –desktop-setup=horizontal,reverse and a couple other little things, and restarted xserver and uh… monitors are in the right order.  looks pretty sweet!  Compiz fusion is running, I have the funky rad animations… but wheres my cube dammit?  go into compizconfig and not one checkbox is selectable for any of the eyecandy. 

ok, so 2 hours later after all sorts of silly googling and forum reading and reinstalls and updates, i found this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=590438 - and now i feel stupid.  CompizConfig -> preferences ->Plugin List -> check off automatic plugin sorting.  heheh.  and we have a cube… so hot. 

So, secondlife looks better than I remember… but still not awesome or as good asa in windows.  its acceptable though. 

Netflix: no.

http://fox.com/fod: no

http://abc.go.com : no

cbs.com?  YES!!  thank you cbs.

http://nbc.com: apparently not.

So this is totally awsome… except for the spontanious xserver restart when I do certain graphics intensive things… *sigh

I can remote desktop  into my laptop to run vpc’s to dev with, thats available albiet a little less than immediately responsive.  All things considered, I can’t use ubuntu for more than a couple hours at a time without becoming frustrated.  Its soooo pretty… but no iTunes, mostly unsupported streaming video, random xserver restarts and the time spent tracing them down to find a real solution, even if its a simple one, and the less than awesome secondlife experience… I think I’ll be booting back over to windows fairly soon.