Well, the Gutsy-Hardy upgrade was a non-event, and I ended up not reinstalling all of the stuff I had because after I went through the list, there might have been half of it that I actually use, so I’ll just install that. I did manage to free up almost 20 gigs of space, though (to be fair, four of those were for an installation of XP in Swedish used to make instructional screen caps), but now I can’t get the Compose key to create all of the characters I need. They’re in the Character map, and I even tried installing Slovak and Swedish language support, but I still can’t get it to make the caret or the ring. Oh well, I’ll figure it out; it’s probably some stupid little thing that I did last time and forgot about. I did run into the login bug about ~/HOME/.dmrc permissions being incorrect, but it didn’t stop me from logging in, and fixing it was as simple as changing the directory permissions in properties. Didn’t even need a terminal. I’m glad I did a clean install because it occurred to me that when I installed Gutsy, I’d got lazy and used Automatix for the third-party stuff, and Automatix never did play nice with upgrades. The devs abandoned the project because now you can just enable restricted stuff in the default install. I haven’t tested a DVD yet, but the videos I checked are fine, and I did install the gstreamer plugins for mp3 support. Couldn’t have been easier, either; all I did was try to open an mp3, and got a prompt to search for the necessary codec, and (unlike Windows Media Player), the search actually came up with the one I needed, and installed it in just a couple of clicks. I don’t know what installed support for WMV and AVI video, and I don’t care (maybe VLC?) Now I just have to figure out how I managed to mute the sound, which was working fine after the install and right up until I shut down last night. I know it’s something I did, though, probably fussing with alsamixer, and it’s not like I haven’t broken stuff before. 🙂

Oh, came across this on some blog and thought it quite amusing….

Macs are overpriced underspec’d poncey toys for people with too much money. Macs are great value for money – you couldn’t get the same spec for the same money elsewhere. OSX is great Windows is shit. Windows is great OSX is shit. 2GB is nowhere near enough memory these days. 2GB might not be enough for Vista but Macs run fine with it. OSX copied Vista. Vista copied OSX. Some boring shit about the finer points of Intel processor technology that’s the equivalent of showing everyone how big your willy is except nobody is interested whatever. OSX is shit and Windows is shit; I run Ubuntu blah blah blah. I hate Steve Jobs he eats babies. Bill Gates eats the babies and their mothers. I run Cock-Rot Linux and it’s the best in the world and I don’t know why everyone uses Ubuntu when you can do everything using Vi and the terminal feature of my obscure mobile phone (which nobody ever rings ’cause I’ve got no friends). Some other boring comment about processors from someone who wants to show the world that his willy is bigger than the other processor posters (okay, one person read the whole post). Apple hardware is overpriced I hate anyone with an iPhone. Actually BSD is much better than Linux or Windows or OSX, that’s why such a large percentage of people have it installed on their home machines. Doh, didn’t you know that OSX is Unix and runs BSD. Actually it’s not Unix ’cause Apple won’t pay for the certification. Yes it is. No it’s not. Fanboi something. Don’t you know the whole fan-boy thing is old and so juvenille, just like your spelling. I still use a Lisa and it does everything I need it to. I use a Commodore 64 with a hard-drive and it’s better than the Lisa. I don’t know what I’m talking about and haven’t read the article but I’m going to chip in with something irrelevant and wrong anyway. OSX sucks. OSX rocks. Bootcamp. DRM. iTunes. Steve Jobs is on first name terms with Satan. Bill Gates is Satan. I’ve got an iPhone and I love it. It really pisses me off that Apple has to put i in front of everything. Something about PPC versus Intel. Something completely without evidence comparing Apples and Oranges (pun intentional) proving PPC is and always will be better than x86. Something completely without evidence comparing Apples and Oranges proving x86 is and always will be better than PPC. GPL. Google. Linux. QNX. My Dad’s harder than your Dad. My Nan’s harder than your nan. Something anti-American. Angry riposte proving anti-American point. Thoughtful welll thought out riposte clearly disproving anti-American point that nobody will ever read because there’s so much uninformed chaff above it.