Irony
March 25th, 2007, 07:10 PM
I'm not sure this belongs in the Cafe but it is a discussion of sorts.
I've just reverted back to Dapper from Edgy; Edgy had a number of problems... messed up bootsplash, open as root didn't work, connect to server didn't work, occasional freezing on booting, they were small but irritating and I was easily able to get around them. One thing that did work noticeably better in Edgy was the Gnome Partition Editor - in Dapper it is at best indecisive. Also the Edgy CD doesn't work as a live CD.
Dapper has no problems so I reverted back to that and discovered a few new things because I wanted to install the latest programs, so here they are plus a few things I've picked up in the past;
Inkscape 0.45.1 - Autopackage http://autopackage.org/downloads.html - I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary but haven't noticed this install system before; it went very smoothly when installing inkscape 0.45.1. I'm not sure why its not mentioned in the Ubuntu forums more often.
Firefox 2.0.0.3- http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/firefox aysiu's and nanotube's script works like magic to install the latest version of firefox. Apparently firefox will now work like the windows version in that it will offer to update automatically when new firefoxes come out.
Blender 2.43 - http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/ I've always found that simply uncompressing the blender.org linux file and running blender from it means blender opens much faster than the repository installed blender. Install Yafray from the repositories and it will run from the uncompressed Blender.
Tiling - http://freshmeat.net/projects/wmtile/ I installed this version of the tiling software which allows me to vertically and horizontally tile windows. A newer version is here http://ftp.unixdev.net/pub/debian-udev/pool/main/t/tile/ though I haven't tried it. I've always wondered why Gnome and KDE don't have this tiling - its something Windows has but not Linux.
Wine - on reverting back to Dapper I found that my fonts were messed up in Wine. So instead of reinstalling the repository Dapper Wine I went to http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb and added the Dapper repository for the latest wine, it works better in that Autosketch 7.0 now has a functional zooming mousewheel and the fonts of wine installed stuff are sorted.
OpenOffice 2.1 - In Dapper and Edgy OO 2.02 and 2.04 don't work properly (zoom and microsoft fonts for example) whereas 2.1 does - note uninstalling the repository OO uninstalls ubuntu-desktop; this is not a problem but when updating to newer Ubuntus it will have to re-installed. Install the DEBs from here http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/misc/openoffice/localized/finnish/stable/2.1.0/latest/ (sudo dpkg -i) or convert the RPMs from here http://download.openoffice.org/2.1.0/index.html?focus=download via alien to DEBs http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=318865&page=3
So in my case Dapper LTS is more workable and more updated than Edgy. Funnily enough I retained the rounded edged windows from Edgy in Dapper, so my Dapper looks rather like Edgy...
I've just reverted back to Dapper from Edgy; Edgy had a number of problems... messed up bootsplash, open as root didn't work, connect to server didn't work, occasional freezing on booting, they were small but irritating and I was easily able to get around them. One thing that did work noticeably better in Edgy was the Gnome Partition Editor - in Dapper it is at best indecisive. Also the Edgy CD doesn't work as a live CD.
Dapper has no problems so I reverted back to that and discovered a few new things because I wanted to install the latest programs, so here they are plus a few things I've picked up in the past;
Inkscape 0.45.1 - Autopackage http://autopackage.org/downloads.html - I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary but haven't noticed this install system before; it went very smoothly when installing inkscape 0.45.1. I'm not sure why its not mentioned in the Ubuntu forums more often.
Firefox 2.0.0.3- http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/firefox aysiu's and nanotube's script works like magic to install the latest version of firefox. Apparently firefox will now work like the windows version in that it will offer to update automatically when new firefoxes come out.
Blender 2.43 - http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/ I've always found that simply uncompressing the blender.org linux file and running blender from it means blender opens much faster than the repository installed blender. Install Yafray from the repositories and it will run from the uncompressed Blender.
Tiling - http://freshmeat.net/projects/wmtile/ I installed this version of the tiling software which allows me to vertically and horizontally tile windows. A newer version is here http://ftp.unixdev.net/pub/debian-udev/pool/main/t/tile/ though I haven't tried it. I've always wondered why Gnome and KDE don't have this tiling - its something Windows has but not Linux.
Wine - on reverting back to Dapper I found that my fonts were messed up in Wine. So instead of reinstalling the repository Dapper Wine I went to http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb and added the Dapper repository for the latest wine, it works better in that Autosketch 7.0 now has a functional zooming mousewheel and the fonts of wine installed stuff are sorted.
OpenOffice 2.1 - In Dapper and Edgy OO 2.02 and 2.04 don't work properly (zoom and microsoft fonts for example) whereas 2.1 does - note uninstalling the repository OO uninstalls ubuntu-desktop; this is not a problem but when updating to newer Ubuntus it will have to re-installed. Install the DEBs from here http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/misc/openoffice/localized/finnish/stable/2.1.0/latest/ (sudo dpkg -i) or convert the RPMs from here http://download.openoffice.org/2.1.0/index.html?focus=download via alien to DEBs http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=318865&page=3
So in my case Dapper LTS is more workable and more updated than Edgy. Funnily enough I retained the rounded edged windows from Edgy in Dapper, so my Dapper looks rather like Edgy...