equivocal ramblings

I’ve been using Amarok on my GNOME desktop for years now, and loving it all the way. Recently I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora 10, and there’s no Amarok 1.4.x package — just the 2.x.

2.x is still nascent in terms of functionality, and every other Gtk based player I’ve tried (Banshee, Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Exaile, BMPx, Listen etc.) don’t do it for me.

Long live Amarok 1.4.x. Whilst not quite what the authors of Amarok dream of — they want to turn it into a rich media platform, which is a nice idea — it was (and still is) amazingly good at what it was meant to do. Play and manage music.

P.S.: So good in fact, that I installed the dependencies and compiled the source for 1.4.10

I’ve been running Fedora 10 since the Preview they released a while back and I must say that I’m incredibly impressed. After switching away from FC 3 to NoNameYet (which became Ubuntu) I’ve never looked back, being thoroughly impressed with it. Fedora has managed to make me reconsider, flaws and all.

First Impressions

It all starts when you boot the computer, and the extremely impressive start-up screen comes on. Not is it just animated, it’s of a blue sun with solar flares. I rebooted 2 or 3 times to just look at it. The show is all too soon over though, since Fedora 10 boots quite fast, almost matching Vista.

Freedom at a (really low) price

Now, Fedora is of course geared towards Freedom in the somewhat narrower than usual definition of software freedom — Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Now this comes at a bit of a price for the typical user — you’ll have to spend quite a few minutes installing bits and pieces of proprietary, or otherwise un-free software like Nvidia drivers, MP3 playback, Java and so on. This isn’t particularly difficult thanks to RPMFusion.

Shiny new stuff

Fedora certainly does deliver on its promise of an up-to-date, easy to use desktop. The latest GNOME, and all the latest GNOME/Gtk/Mono applications are included in repositories, and are merely a click and some automated downloading away.

The bad

One complaint I do have about Fedora though is yum and PackageKit, the package management duo of choice. Compared to apt it is downright sluggish. All the waiting required makes me pre-plan(!) my package management.

Thoughts

I find that Fedora makes for an able desktop, wonderful development environment, and presents a good chance to contribute to the free software community. I haven’t even been trying and I’ve filed bugs and spent a couple of hours with the SELinux people discussing minor problems in the Preview. For some reason it seems to encourage me to give back shrug.

Maybe it’ll even convince me to start contributing code again…

Dell mailed me my Vista SP1 disc a couple of weeks ago and I decided to take the opportunity to install fresh and see how I liked Vista. Overall it’s been much better than the initial release of Vista. Things don’t randomly freeze up (as much) and file operations don’t randomly take hours to complete for no reason (as much).

Vista is a lot more compatible with my hardware (webcam works, USB drives work faster in general etc.) than Linux is, and this has been nice. Having full syncing with my Sony Ericsson K850i is also nice.

Still, I don’t feel comfortable using Vista. Whenever I boot into Ubuntu and log in to my GNOME desktop I almost feel a sense of relief. It’s that same feeling you get when you return home after a vacation. Granted, the vacation might’ve been just what you needed, it was nice etc. but you still love that you’re home and that you’ll be sleeping in your own bed again. That’s the feeling I get when booting back into GNOME from Vista.

I just bought my first pair of ‘noise-isolating’ earbuds today — SonicGear’s EarPump. I paid RM 39.90, so I wasn’t expecting much from them.

I was wrong. The fit is excellent — with three different sizes of rubber in-ear seals to choose from, and a spare set of the medium seals there’s something for most ear sizes. In my case, the mediums fit perfectly and comfortably, sealing out most outside noise.

Overall I’m quite happy with sound reproduction. Treble comes through loud and clear, with bass being a little too far on the restrained side for me. The mid-range is somewhat strong, but that doesn’t bother me too much. Overall I’m quite happy with sound reproduction though I wish the bass was a little more defined.

Apart from the headphones and extra seals, the package comes with a carry case which has spare room for a small MP3 player; something along the lines of a Creative Zen Stone would fit perfectly in there with the phones.

A serious problem that has emerged after my testing is that the majority of MP3s in my library aren’t ripped well enough and have a constant background noise to them. My commercially purchased tracks, as well as higher bit-rate rips sound excellent however.

P.S.: I think EarPump sounds like something you’d rather not have happen to yourself :(

I saw this ad on a gaming website and was rather amused:

Yes, I’m sure deep character skills are a big part of the game.

I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. — Dr. Maya Angelou

For Google and my forgetful self:

To merge two contacts in Kopete into one, right click on the contact you wish to be added to the other, go to the protocol menu (usually last) and choose *Change Meta Contact*. Now search and pick the one you want to add it to.

I’ve had to redo my contact list a few times, and I’d been doing it to most braindead of ways: Removing contacts and readding them under the right meta-contact… Still this isn’t the most obvious of workflows.

Dear Windows Live,

Windows Live Messenger took 1 hour and 30 minutes to install thanks your installer deciding my offline package (downloaded just this afternoon) was too old. Apparently there was a minute version mismatch with the latest one in your repository.

Installing software on Windows in general is an already slow process, but you seem to think that it’d be awesome to slow me down further. Please bear in mind that not everyone has a T3 connection.

Please fix. Kthnxbai.

Sincerely, Kevin.

The installation process for openSUSE 11 is quite impressive. LVM, package selection, desktop selection etc. were all top-notch without any hiccups (unlike my past experiences with Fedora). Post-installation set up was quite smooth as well, except for the part where I wanted a static IP — took 15 minutes to figure the GUI for that out. Seems more geared towards network administrators than end users.

I can’t say I expected the green to be pleasant, but I can’t complain — looks very nice. Overall, solid stuff.

Vista Service Pack 1. I put music on, walk away and come back a while later. My screensaver is active. I click the mouse once to deactivate it, and what happens? Audio playback skips.

Vista Service Pack 1 Audio: Fail.

P.S.: I can’t help but notice that everything I write about Vista tends to the negative. About the only positive thing I can say is that It’s quite pretty.