equivocal ramblings

As most of the Linux world already knows, Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” v7.04 was released a couple of days ago. So being the good early-adopter that I am, here’s what I did to upgrade:

1. apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade to update my Edgy Eft
2. vim /etc/apt/sources.list, a dash of VIM magic, :s%:edgy:feisty to make APT look at the new stuff
3. apt-get dist-upgrade
4. Whimper at the message — 997MB of packages to be downloaded
5. Go to sleep and pray it’s done in the morning

None of that GUI nonsense. I’ll use my command line damnit!

Was it worth the upgrade? Well, there aren’t any blindingly obvious new features on the KDE side of things, unlike the GNOME folks who are at this very moment raving about drop shadows and compositing I’d imagine. It certainly feels more evolutionary than revolutionary, which is how I like it.

I have noticed a few new versions of things, like Amarok — got a few new buttons to play with, some fancier TreeViews with album art in it etc. I’m sure more stuff will show up in the next few days as I actually use the system.

So far only two things have gone bad:

1. The file manager (Konqueror) suddenly decided it didn’t need half it’s menu items, and that toolbars were useless. A quick quit/restart fixed this. So no biggie.
2. OpenOffice.org. What were they thinking? It looked ugly before with it’s non-native toolkit, but these new icons are just horrid. They’re a cross between Windows 3.11 and the Lila theme. It’s like they want us to hate OpenOffice.

I’ve been testing Vista out for a few days now, and I have to say, it’s not too bad really.

• You definitely need 1GB of RAM to operate it as comfortably as Windows XP. 2GB definitely recommended. Office work is fine on the 512MB I have, but … more than that and you’re pushing the limits of what the human mind can withstand when it comes to waiting for applications to catch up.
• UAC, or User Account Control is annoying, much more so than Ubuntu’s way of handling Linux’s restrictive environment.
• Aero Basic isn’t bad at all. Quite a bit better than XP to be honest.
• Windows Calendar, Contacts and Mail are nice enough for normal office use.
• Explorer has a lot more ‘rich’ views — contacts, etc. Also, it’s blazingly fast when loading up system views like Control Panel
• All my stuff works, except for … well all of it works. I had an interesting experience with drivers — I installed an XP audio driver and it failed, but then Vista was like Would you like to install that with recommended settings? and it worked afterwards. Nice.

Yeah, I caved and got myself a 1GB flash based MP3 player:

(Mine’s black)

Sound Quality

As usual for a Sony product, excellent. It comes with AVLS — Sony’s fancy acronym for what basically artificially limits the volume to levels below that which would render you deaf by 30. Custom and preset equalizers, some form of normalization (not sure how it works, but it seems to) and of course, a decent pair of headphones. Not much more to say really.

Aesthetics

To say it looks good is an understatement. From the semi-transparent skin, to the flush screen, it’s all good. The front panel itself is actually a transparent plastic piece, with all wording and logos printed beneath it. Below the panel is then the actual layer that gives it colour. Quite a nice, subtle effect.

The flush screen is just awesome. It looks like they somehow managed to integrate the screen into the actual surface of the player — you can’t see the usual screen boundaries even if you try. The only hint you get that it’s just an effect is in the dark when you can see the backlight glowing around the square plate.

It comes in a really handy form factor too. It’s somewhat larger than the average thumbdrive, which makes it really easy to just slip into your pocket and forget about.

Interface

With a screen that small, I expected something of a headache when it came to navigating the various menus. Surprisingly though, most of the time it works well. I’ve not had to resort to reading the manual at all. The one irritating thing about the player was that it defaulted to beeping with each action (Next, Previous, Stop, Open menu etc.) but that was easy enough to turn off — Options -> Advanced -> Beep | Off.

The Software

SonicStage, the application used to manage the player quite frankly not going to win any awards. It’s alright for it’s stated job, but you won’t see me using it to play music regularly. Thankfully, there are various third party applications that work fine at managing the files on the player, and quite a few of them are Java based, which makes this player Linux compatible. Shocking eh?

Verdict

Overall, a good buy. Sony needs a kick where it hurts for the disaster of SonicStage, but since there are many applications that do a good job of music management, it’s not so bad.

Today, as I wept with despair at the difficulties of reading Flash 8/Flash Media Server 2 documentation with Adobe’s PDF tools, ivan (from #joiito on freenode.net) pointed me in the direction of Foxit Reader, an alternative PDF reader.

Now, to say that this reader is awesome would be an understatement. It loads in less than a seconds, and opens PDF files in a flash. The best part though is seeking/searching in a PDF file is instantaneous. No delays, no waits, no hour glass icons. It’s a little creepy how they’ve managed to make it look almost exactly like a lighter version of Acrobat though…

It is blazingly fast. I highly recommend this if you need a speedy PDF reader.