They list the steps for a Windows performance boost as follows:

• Update drivers
• Update firmware
• Give Windows less to think about (involving messing with the registry, disabling unnecessary graphic effects, removing unused fonts etc.)
• Overwhelmed by icons? (Involving messing around with msconfig.)
• Malware removal
• Defrag the hard drive

Now consider that updating drivers — and especially firmware — requires very specific knowledge of your hardware, while rummaging around in the registry and msconfig requires a good deal of knowledge about how software works and in some cases knowledge about — or ability to guess — how software vendors may choose to name their executables and the paths at which they might put the executables. Malware removal may have become easier over the years, but to a lot of users the terminology and processes involved seem intimidating, which ultimately stops them from doing it properly; or at all. And finally, defragmentation? Are you fucking kidding me?

Now Linux (let’s just take any Debian based distro for these examples.)

• Updating drivers is handled like all other updates, i.e. unless you’ve specifically disabled the automatic check for updates, you’ll be prompted to install fresh drivers pretty much as soon as they’re available. No manual searching required (unless you have some poorly supported hardware that doesn’t have drivers in any of the available repositories).
• Updating firmware can be a bitch, since most firmware updaters are Win only. On the other hand, I’ve never had to update my firmware from Linux on neither my MacBook nor my ThinkPad, so personally I regard this as a non-issue, but your mileage may vary.
• Cleaning up the registry… What registry?
• Managing applications that auto-start? System > Preferences > Startup Applications — easy and not as potentially dangerous as msconfig!
• Disabling unnecessary visual effects? System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects.
• Malware removal. Not really necessary (for the time being), but under all circumstances no harder than on Windows.
• Defragmentation. No!

So to sum up, all you actively need to do to keep a Debian based Linux box speedy is basically to decide which applications and services you want to start up as you log in. That’s it! (If you’re really picky about getting the most out of your battery, you may want to turn off visual effects while running on battery power; or all together.)

Now I’m left wondering why so many people think that running Linux is for geeks only. To me it seems like running a Windows machine (and keeping it running) requires a good deal of knowledge about your computer’s hardware, it is insanely time-consuming and in general a pain in the ass. (I wouldn’t know for sure since I haven’t done it for several years, but I still help plenty of people with their Windows related problems.) No matter what OS people run, they always tend to have a backup geek they can turn to when things get too complicated — that goes for OS X, Windows and Linux, so why not start relying a little more on your personal Linux geek?

Please note that any or all of these minor problems—maybe with the exception of the everlasting iSight issue—may be fixed in the final version.

First Impressions

First of all, someone has been working wonders on the Intel 945GM video driver, and I’m not talking small, lame wonders like the pyramids or something, I’m talking OMFGWTFBBQ!?!11-sized wonders!

Using wildly unscientific and unreliable readings from glxgears:

– 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex): ~1100 fps
– 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope): ~900 fps (and I’m being generous here)
– 9.10 (Karmic Koala): ~3200 fps!

Yes, you heard (or read) me right — I’ve got 3x more frames per second than I did in 8.10. I bet your puny pyramids are looking pretty silly now, huh? It could of course be because someone just introduced a bug in the glxgears code and I’m only actually getting 4 frames per year, but graphics feel smoother and I think I could almost run a 3D accelerated game on it.

Apart from the hotness that is the new Intel video driver, there are loads of other improvements over previous releases. Boot time has improved significantly, and the same goes for login time, which is really nice. GDM (the login window) has been completely rewritten, which results in a smoother and nicer login experience. (Yeah, I know it sounds lame to be talking about “login experience”, but go ahead, try it! If you’ve ever tried login in to a Gnome desktop before, you’ll see what I mean.) This rewrite also means that I can now suspend my laptop while being logged out, which is really, really nice — and about time.

The classic brown/orange Ubuntu look has gotten even browner (i.e. darker) and it actually looks so good that I’m sticking to the default theme with one of the bundled backgrounds for now. The default icon set has been given an overhaul for the better and behind the scenes we’ve got Ext4 as the default file system, Grub 2 as the new boot-loader, DeviceKit replacing HAL and other nice things.

Setting Up

Almost everything worked out of the box with some minor exceptions though. So far I haven’t run into any problems relating to wifi, suspend/resume/hibernate, graphics/video, bluetooth or any of the things that usually makes installing any OS on a Mac a living hell.

What needs tampering with is mainly the keyboard layout and maybe the sound. If you want to use the built-in iSight, you probably got a little work ahead of you, but otherwise fixing these minor issues will take you maybe 5–10 minutes.

Touchpad Behaviour

This “problem” is so ridiculously tiny, that I’m not even sure why I’m including it, but since I’m installing on a MacBook, I want the touchpad to behave like it does in OS X, and it pretty much does. I only had to open the mouse preferences (System > Preferences > Mouse) and tell it to enable two-finger scrolling and that was that. Right click is—if you’ve disabled tapping the touchpad for clicking—two fingers + click and middle click is 3 fingers + click. If you’re using tapping for clicking, I’m guessing 2 finger tap is right click and 3 finger tap is middle click, but I don’t know, I haven’t tried it.

Keyboard Setup

The keyboard, however, is quite another story, because this koala doesn’t use xmodmap, which us Mac-users previously used to assign Alt Gr-functionality to the key of our choice. After selecting the appropriate keyboard layout (Apple / MacBook/MacBookPro (intl.)) I wasn’t able to write @, $, {, [, ], }, ~ or |, or any other key that required me to press Alt Gr. Fortunately I could for unknown reasons write those characters in my Gnome Terminal (but not anywhere else) and copy/paste from there, but that is no fun in the long run and it certainly proves problematic when you try to log in with a password containing any of those characters.

However, after a little googling I quickly found that commenting out the following 2 lines in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc along with a minor adjustment in System > Preferences > Keyboard did the job.

Make sure these two lines in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc looks like this (i.e. add “//” at the beginning of the lines):

//    modifier_map Mod4   { <LWIN> };
...
//    modifier_map Mod4   { <RWIN> };

If you don’t know how to edit that particular file, hit Alt-F2 (or Alt-Fn-F2 if you haven’t switched Fn-mode) to bring up the “Run Application” dialog and type:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc

When you’re done editing the file and your changes are saved, go to System > Preferences > Keyboard, select the Layouts tab and click Layout Options. Expand “Key to choose 3rd level” and put a check mark next to the key you want to be your Alt Gr. Personally I’m using “Right Win” (i.e. the Cmd/Apple key to the right of the space bar), but another option is to use that retarded Enter key between aforementioned Apple key and left arrow (check “Enter on keypad” for that).

Function Keys

The Mute/Volume keys (on F3, F4 and F5) and the eject key works out of the box, but the brightness keys (on F1 and F2) needs a little attention — nothing big, just install the package pommed and that’s it.

If you—like me—don’t like the default Fn-key behaviour, where you have to hold Fn to actually press F1-F12 — i.e. Alt-Fn-F2 to bring up the “Run Application” dialog, then there’s an easy fix on the Ubuntu Wiki: AppleKeyboard.

No Sound in Your Headphones?

I had a weird issue with sound working fine with the internal speakers, but once I connected my headphones or stereo to the output jack, I got nothing. At first I thought I was going to have to recompile a bunch of kernel modules, find a virgin to sacrifice and perhaps give away my first-born, but it turned out to be simpler than that. I installed the package gnome-alsamixer and unmuted all channels and everything was fine. Maybe the devs could make sure that all channels are unmuted on install?

Webcam/iSight

The built-in iSight takes a lot of work to get running, and I never ever use the damn thing, so I don’t really care. Of course, it’d be nice if it did work, but Apple is mostly at fault here, because they’re so bitchy about releasing specs and firmware. Back in the olden days you’d have to extract the firmware from your OS X install, which could be done with the package isight-firmware-tools — I imagine that’s still the case. If you try, test it with the package cheese, which is basically a PhotoBooth clone, and let me know how it turns out.

Th-th-th-that’s all, folks! Really! Apart from the iSight (which I couldn’t care less about), everything’s working better than ever and the koala is fast becoming my favorite pet in the zoo that is Ubuntu Linux.

Steve Jobs: “Home sharing: we‘re going to let you copy songs, TV shows, etc. with up to 5 computers in your house.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, thanks a lot. Are you really going to let me do that? Gee, Steve! I don’t know what to say. I can play my DVDs on pretty much any device with a DVD drive without being limited to 5. I can even let friends borrow them without being worried that I won’t be able to see them myself when I buy a new DVD player because it would just happen to be the 6th device to play back that particular DVD. And don’t get me started on my vinyl collection.^[1]

I’m not sure I want an OS riddled with antifeatures, where I’m at the mercy of what Steve Jobs and Co. will let me do with my data.

^[1]: Irony would have it that in this recent press event, Apple announced the iTunes LP, which is basically nothing like a vinyl, but more like the many failed attempts at releasing extra material in a data track on a regular CD album. So get ready for craploads of cheesy DVD-like animated menus and metric tonnes of completely useless and indifferent bonus material.

This allows you to build your own web server with your favourite applications pre-installed and set up, so all you have to do is install it and boot, and you can also use it to make your own desktop distro with your favourite apps installed, configured and ready to go. Pretty nifty, eh?

For further demonstration check out their screencasts.

Actually, I stumbled across this theme because I had to do an urgent upgrade of WordPress because of a nasty, nasty flaw recently discovered and described on Full Disclosure. Basically it allows anyone to reset the admin password effectively locking out the standard admin user, so if you’re running WordPress, make sure to update to the latest version at once — and upgrading is not that hard. I upgraded from an ancient version without a single problem (that I know of).

Now, talk about jumping to conclusions — not to mention the wildy exagerated title! I’m willing to bet that MS won’t ship Windows 7 without any means of installing IE8 (e.g. via something like curl or wget — or simly via FTP). I’m pretty sure there’ll be big fat icon in some prominent location saying “Install Internet Explorer”. Besides, it’s not really that hard (for anyone) to open Explorer and type in: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org and navigate to the Firefox EXE and double-click — especially if Mozilla would make a shortcut. (Hint hint!) Alternatively, if MS wants to be really cool, they could offer installation of either of the major browsers when installing Windows 7. I.e. something like: “Thanks for installing Windows 7, which browser(s) would you like to install? IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome?” Or they could even go as far as saying “Would you prefer MS defaults or non-MS defaults?” Where MS defaults would be IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player etc., and non-MS would be e.g. Firefox + Thunderbird + VLC, Opera + VLC or something completely different. MS already had something like this in XP SP2, where you could select standard setups (either MS or non-MS), which would then affect settings such as the default browser, mail client, media player and IM client. Pretty un-MS-ish and ironically my all-time favorite feature in Windows.

This is typical of Politiken’s  IT section. They always pretend to be seeing stuff from the end-user’s, while apparently being even more clueless than the average (l)user. Or maybe they have ulterior motives. Maybe they don’t like the EU putting up a fight against the MS monopoly and messing with their precious Windows. Either way it’s “journalism” like this, that makes the least technically inclined users stick to Windows XP, 98 or whatever untill someone or something forces them to upgrade.

Update (May 5 2009 @ 4:32 AM): The phpCF page is now updated and with links to tar-balls, docs and stuff.

In this case it’s Microsoft’s (deliberately?) half-assed implementation of ODF rendering my previous predictions of doom and destruction more than just a little inaccurate. I guess my praise was a bit premature. I should have known better.

So in this post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world it is now possible to actually use OpenOffice.org and send your ODF document to a Word user and expect them to be able to open it! While this is somewhat unexpected coming from Microsoft, it’s really a huge benefit to all word processor users of the world and a nice move from the people in Redmond. Of course, they’re not just doing it to be nice — there are certainly financial aspects to it — but still it shows that they are “getting it” even though it’s taken them some time.

Now, let’s sit back and watch how long it takes for Apple to implement native ODF support in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. My guess is that it’ll be a while. Actually, I’m getting more and more tired of being held hostage by Apple’s ideas of what I want — and am allowed — to use my computer/OS for, while Microsoft seems to be heading in a more sensible and  Open direction. Of course, first and foremost I’m a Linux-user, but with Windows 7 getting rave reviews and these nice additions in Office 2007 SP2 (not that I do, or ever will, use Microsoft Office or any other office suite for that matter) I might just give Microsoft another chance after ditching Windows back in 2001. Kudos to the Redmond crew for going with what the users want instead of what they want the users to have.

So will KEEP actually be written from scratch? Or will they simply bundle whatever Open Source software they find into one neat package? The project description doesn’t say anything about it. The first is stupid, because a lot of the Open Source emulators available are of high quality, are quite portable, have been developed for many years now and are still maintained. Some shiny new software is likely to be less stable and compatible, and the project description doesn’t give any promise of the software being maintained in the future. The latter is simply too expensive. €4.02 million for bundling some Open Source software?

Also, while preserving the games is all well and good, there’s more to preserving video game history than just preserving the software. Playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii with the Wiimote is NOT the same as playing it with the good old, unhandy NES controller (even though the Wiimote is quite unhandy for that purpose).