Friday, April 24, 2009

The Jackalope jumps

My work lappy now has Jaunty Jackalope gracing it's hard drive.

First let me say I am impressed that the download went as fast as it did. Between using Down Them All, and a good network connection I averaged about 200 kb on the download. So it took about an hour and a half.

The upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty was mostly painless. I did have a slight issue when it forgot that there was a Window install on hd0,0 but I quickly modified /boot/grub/menu.lst and it was working as intended.

I am still poking around with some of the settings. It did remember to keep all my compiz settings and I do think the cube is responding better and smoother. I'll have to update more as I continue to use it. Overall so far so good.

One more thing wireless and sound seem to be working fine so far but I did hear one report of a co-working having an issue with the wireless driver, but I cannot confirm it.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

1 Day till the Jackalope is on the loose

One more day till Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope is released. A release that I look forward to.

The new Gnome is supposed to have better dual monitor support which is necessary given my old laptop that I often hook up to my Samsung 42" LCD TV in order to watch Hulu. In the past it has been a little bit of a hassel switching between the laptop and laptop + TV. Between Gnome 2.26 and X.Org 1.6 I'm hoping this becomes a smoother process until I can build my MythTV box.

I'm not sure if I'll update to the Ext4 file system though. If I do it will be on my older laptop which is more suitable to being wiped out and reinstalled. If all goes well I may go ahead and update my aging Ubuntu 7.10 system. However it is still working flawlessly so I may not brake whats not broken.

Over all I'm looking forward to the release but I don't think it's a huge game changer. My one hope is that more people will try it and see if it works well enough for their needs. So far my wife has has little problem with her laptop after I deleted her corrupted Vista install (the SP1 update killed it) and has only complained to me when it couldn't get on the network, which was really a problem with the access point.

A cautionary note:

For you die hards who are itching to gab this update, you may want to hold off a couple of days. As usual the Ubuntu release date is going to be flooded with requests to download and will probably be very slow. I know that last time I tried to download 8.10 on the release day from home it took a very long time.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Oracle puts on asbestos gloves and grabs the Sun

On Monday the 20th of April Oracle put on a flame retardant suit, some asbestos gloves and made sure a fire extinguisher was near by as it grabs hold of Sun. For you non-tech readers out their this is a big deal.

So the question becomes what does this mean for Sun's holdings? Many of which have become foundational to the we world. The two big ones being MySQL and JAVA. Now some analysts seem to think Oracle is buying into the server space. This has some merit as the cloud is starting to take off. Oracle may want some of that pie and Sun may just be the vehicle to do it.

Then again this is also a cheep with Sun's financial issues this became a buying opportunity to get JAVA which Oracle uses extensively. Many in the Open source world are wondering what this might do to them when Oracle takes control of MySQL?

MySQL was acquired by Sun back in 2008 for the nice some of $1 billion. However there was noted issues between some of the original MySQL founders and Sun leading to some like Monty to leave. Now MySQL will change hands yet again but not just any hands. With Oracle having it's own database it beggs the question as to what Oracle will plan to do with MySQL's business? For some time MySQL was nipping at Oracle to be a full fledged rival. MySQL already dominates the web space so this change leaves some very valid questions.

One other think I have yet to see anyone talk about is Open Office. Sun created Star Office and it's Open Source brother Open Office. Will Sun continue this development or just cut ties with Open Office? Then again they could put more backing behind it in the hopes of competing with Microsoft Office.

Either way this leads for a interesting time in tech.

EOP