![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiWell, with a connection speed of roughly 10kB/s when it's working at all and a chain of hardware and software fails as long as my arm it's taken roughly two weeks, but I have prevailed over lousy Internet connections (seriously, BT, fix our damn phone line already), impossible networking problems and crappy ancient monitors that no longer support basic functions such as displaying output from the graphics card, and I have rebuilt my poor laptop.
That's right, Canonical. Everything you screwed up, I have fixed. Eventually.
I feel obliged at this point to mention that this is the first time I have ever had a problem upgrading an Ubuntu distro in five years of use, but really, it does prove how closely Ubuntu - and presumably other open-source OSs - resembles the little girl in the rhyme. When it's good, it's very good. When it's bad, it's five hours of tearing your hair out and screaming things like, "Yeah, and you know why it's called bash? Because THAT'S WHAT I'M GOING TO ****ING DO TO IT!" before finding out that the problem existed between the keyboard and chair and basically amounted to you consistently mis-spelling 'sudo'.
I exaggerate, but not as much as I'd like.
The original problem: upgrading to Karmic buggered up my wifi and DVD playing capabilities, so that I could neither get the damn thing onto the Internet nor watch Doctor Who. I know I bought this thing to be a typewriter, but come on. What modern typewriter can't play Doctor Who?
Again, in defense of my favourite OS, most of my problems this time were hardware related; the whole thing would have been over in less than a week if I had been able to download updates and distro upgrades in less than ten hours apiece, had had the right cable, a working monitor, etc. And as usual, once the packages had downloaded the actual format/install/upgrade process went like a dream - less than ten minutes on the first two counts, and possibly the third as well (I wouldn't know, having been in bed at the time), not to mention a mere 10 minutes to back up 18 GB of data from my home folder. Nevertheless, if Karmic had just damn well installed nicely the first time I wouldn't have had to reformat my hard drive, reinstall Jaunty and upgrade it to Karmic again, then go through all the fuss of reinstalling get_iplayer (before Waters of Mars disappeared from the iPlayer website) and the metric fucktonne of codecs required to play BBC DVDs. I live in hope that one day there will simply be a checkbox that says, "I've paid my TV license and I bought all of these legally, just let me watch them already," but no luck so far.
To make matters worse, I don't really like Karmic. The boot screen is ugly, the Add/Remove Programs tool has been removed in favour of a simplified Software Manager (although I did thankfully find the old tool using the new tool, and have reinstalled it), and although Ubuntu One sounds vaguely useful, I can't actually try it out due to the aforementioned 10kB/s connection speed (on a good day. While staring mournfully at slow-moving upgrades over the past couple of days, I have seen it dip as low as 400 b/s. That's bytes per second, I am not kidding). Superficial complaints? Sure. I reserve the right to be a little shallow after spending two weeks struggling with the back-end.
In happier open-source news, today I also discovered Mozilla Songbird. I've been looking for a replacement for iTunes for ages, preferably something that I could use on both Windoze and Linux, with little success until today.
Songbird uses the same basic back-end as other Mozilla products, in that it saves a nice profile that I can copy from one hard drive to another and thus preserve my playlists. It imported from iTunes without the slightest fuss, loads about five times faster, has a really, really nice layout for the library with a search bar and a quick, simple way to change your sort criteria... and a built-in browser. No, I don't fully understand that last part either, though I assume it's to do with downloading music, but it made finding extensions much easier. The default theme is a little plain, but since it's open-source, that's easy enough to change - there's even askin feather available that changes it to match your default theme.
By comparison with Banshee, which is what I was using on Linux, Songbird does less spectacularly than against iTunes - but mainly because iTunes has become so terrible of late. Mostly it's in a better state of development; Banshee had a couple of really irritating bugs, including one that caused it once to drop all metadata from all tracks. Given that Banshee's library was unmanageable without that metadata and I'd already risked RSI setting it up once, I wasn't happy.
As a final insult, when I uninstalled iTunes it did not clean up properly - left all of its shortcuts behind, and goodness only knows what else. Since I'm going to have to reinstall it to strip the DRM off my purchased files, though, doing its housekeeping for it is a problem for another time. Say next week...
That's right, Canonical. Everything you screwed up, I have fixed. Eventually.
I feel obliged at this point to mention that this is the first time I have ever had a problem upgrading an Ubuntu distro in five years of use, but really, it does prove how closely Ubuntu - and presumably other open-source OSs - resembles the little girl in the rhyme. When it's good, it's very good. When it's bad, it's five hours of tearing your hair out and screaming things like, "Yeah, and you know why it's called bash? Because THAT'S WHAT I'M GOING TO ****ING DO TO IT!" before finding out that the problem existed between the keyboard and chair and basically amounted to you consistently mis-spelling 'sudo'.
I exaggerate, but not as much as I'd like.
The original problem: upgrading to Karmic buggered up my wifi and DVD playing capabilities, so that I could neither get the damn thing onto the Internet nor watch Doctor Who. I know I bought this thing to be a typewriter, but come on. What modern typewriter can't play Doctor Who?
Again, in defense of my favourite OS, most of my problems this time were hardware related; the whole thing would have been over in less than a week if I had been able to download updates and distro upgrades in less than ten hours apiece, had had the right cable, a working monitor, etc. And as usual, once the packages had downloaded the actual format/install/upgrade process went like a dream - less than ten minutes on the first two counts, and possibly the third as well (I wouldn't know, having been in bed at the time), not to mention a mere 10 minutes to back up 18 GB of data from my home folder. Nevertheless, if Karmic had just damn well installed nicely the first time I wouldn't have had to reformat my hard drive, reinstall Jaunty and upgrade it to Karmic again, then go through all the fuss of reinstalling get_iplayer (before Waters of Mars disappeared from the iPlayer website) and the metric fucktonne of codecs required to play BBC DVDs. I live in hope that one day there will simply be a checkbox that says, "I've paid my TV license and I bought all of these legally, just let me watch them already," but no luck so far.
To make matters worse, I don't really like Karmic. The boot screen is ugly, the Add/Remove Programs tool has been removed in favour of a simplified Software Manager (although I did thankfully find the old tool using the new tool, and have reinstalled it), and although Ubuntu One sounds vaguely useful, I can't actually try it out due to the aforementioned 10kB/s connection speed (on a good day. While staring mournfully at slow-moving upgrades over the past couple of days, I have seen it dip as low as 400 b/s. That's bytes per second, I am not kidding). Superficial complaints? Sure. I reserve the right to be a little shallow after spending two weeks struggling with the back-end.
In happier open-source news, today I also discovered Mozilla Songbird. I've been looking for a replacement for iTunes for ages, preferably something that I could use on both Windoze and Linux, with little success until today.
Songbird uses the same basic back-end as other Mozilla products, in that it saves a nice profile that I can copy from one hard drive to another and thus preserve my playlists. It imported from iTunes without the slightest fuss, loads about five times faster, has a really, really nice layout for the library with a search bar and a quick, simple way to change your sort criteria... and a built-in browser. No, I don't fully understand that last part either, though I assume it's to do with downloading music, but it made finding extensions much easier. The default theme is a little plain, but since it's open-source, that's easy enough to change - there's even a
By comparison with Banshee, which is what I was using on Linux, Songbird does less spectacularly than against iTunes - but mainly because iTunes has become so terrible of late. Mostly it's in a better state of development; Banshee had a couple of really irritating bugs, including one that caused it once to drop all metadata from all tracks. Given that Banshee's library was unmanageable without that metadata and I'd already risked RSI setting it up once, I wasn't happy.
As a final insult, when I uninstalled iTunes it did not clean up properly - left all of its shortcuts behind, and goodness only knows what else. Since I'm going to have to reinstall it to strip the DRM off my purchased files, though, doing its housekeeping for it is a problem for another time. Say next week...