Thursday, May 01, 2008

Ubuntu Hardy Heron

I've updated to the latest stable version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. Not a whole lot of change that I can see. Firefox is updated to 3 beta 5. I'd already tried it--On my work laptop it worked fine, but here it gave fits with Google Reader, which was a dealbreaker. I looked again for a fix--Turns out to be maybe the simplest fix ever--Type CTRL-O. (Apparently on some machines where you've played with font sizes, something goofs reader up) The other thing that irritated me was that it deleted XMMS, the Linux version of Winamp, without suggesting an alternative with a similar GUI. I've been using the Winamp GUI for long enough that a competing player would have to be really compelling for me to make the switch. After a bit of research, I found that Audacious has a similar interface. Not sure if it is as stable, I've had a couple of GUI glitches in the little bit I've used it. The login has a glitch where the username and password are 10 times normal size (in a normal sized window)--This is similar to a glitch I had the first time I tried Compiz (does nifty but ultimately useless things with windows), except this time limited to the login dialog. I think I know about how to fix it--Add a line back to the xorg config file, but I'm too lazy and it isn't annoying enough to worry about looking up the exact details. Suspend still doesn't work right--It did a few versions ago, but the update 6 months ago broke it, this update didn't fix it. My laptop will suspend, but won't wake up without a hard power reset.

2 comments:

  1. You might look into doing a re-install (I dabble in Kubuntu, and if forced, Ubuntu) of xmms - either by apt-get, yum, or synaptic.

    I've run into a couple of other packages on this and other installs that were either removed or "got strange" that suddenly improved after a re-install of the relevant packages.

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  2. I did some more investigation. XMMS relies on depreciated libraries, and has been removed from many distributions, including the Ubuntu repositories that Hardy uses. Audacious is a fork, using some of the XMMS code but updating to current libraries. XMMS2 has little to do with XMMS. It is an ambitious project for a much different player. It currently has a command line interface, with capacity for "client" GUI programs that can be on different computers. Neat concept, but the simple Winamp interface doesn't appear to be ready yet.

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