Manchester goes Karmic

Watch the netbook!
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I was at the Manchester Ubuntu Karmic release party last night at the Pitcher and piano. Not as focussed as the Jaunty do earlier in the year. A good get together though! I'd upgraded my work laptop earlier in the day - just so it was ready for the evening, went slowly but smoothly - the only issues I have is I seem to be constrained to use kdm as a login manager - before the upgrade I was using gdm

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

doesn't seem to do it. I shall have to try fiddling around in /etc/X11. (Later - ah this is gdm,it just looks rather different and at the monent has no, well not many, options on configuration).
Before the upgrade I was using firefox 3.5 which wasn't the 'official' version, post upgrade, 3.5 is official but the browser has my bookmarks/saved tabs and passwords from 3.0 and the ones from before are nowhere to be seen! A colleague has expereinced issues with an identical ASUS laptop and the nividia driver for the G9650M GT graphics card. It seemed to be ok for me but once I started something kde related, I too, got graphical artifacts (junk!) all over the screen. Known bug with the latest nvidia driver and that card (happens on both Linux and Windows) and they don't appear to be in a hurry to fix it. I shall try keeping away from kde and see what happens! My other photo from the evening is here.

Patent trolls

If you've not already read Groklaw's account of Microsoft's incestuous relationship with patent troll's, you should. Selling patents to unscrupulous companies so that they can launch anti Linux patent law suits whilst keeping their hands ever so clean..

emacs!

Maybe I should record, for the hordes who haven't yet heard, that emacs 23.1 has been released. Download it here for the editor that's actually an operating system.

Sexism and apologies

Back here I promised a link to the Hidden in plain view post on a culture of sexism in FLOSS (Free-Libre Open Source Software) - so there it is, and here's Matt Zimmermann on the same subject with lots of comments! While you're there go and read his post on proper apologies vs the "I'm sorry if" "I'm sorry but" and "I'm sorry that you" evasions beloved of all of us at one time or the other.