My Soul Hath Elbow Room!

I just opened Firefox, typed 'ch' into the address bar and hit the down arrow once to get my Dreamwidth URL up, appended '/update' to the URL and started typing. I am listening to Die Fledermaus (again) on Rhythmbox. If I feel like it, I can watch a DVD in a minute.

The impressive bit? Three hours ago, this computer was running a different operating system. And so was my laptop.

( Ubuntu: Karmic to Lucid in an hour and a half. )

Yeah, that's it. I'm out of things to say about Lucid Lynx, except that I'm very glad I switched from Karmic and very happy with it so far.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and play with Nautilus some more.

Well, 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.

( Windows has encountered a teal deer and needs to close. )

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 skin 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...