Data Circle

I have been using the latest version of Ubuntu for a couple of weeks now, and so far it is proving to be a fairly robust and reliable system—certainly good enough for me to do my job, write development code and work on my thesis on a daily basis.

The only problems I have encountered so far are:

• Corrupt tracker index problem – I can’t believe this made it into the final release as it seems to have affected so many people it should have picked up in testing. There is a proposed solution and a workaround, but unfortunately everyone seems to be using the latter (can’t blame them – having a working machine is generally more important than testing bugs for most people). If I get a bit of time over the weekend I might install a separate instance under VMWare and see if I can do some testing.
• Freeciv doesn’t have any sound, unless you install the freeciv-sound package—and even then you’ll be lucky to get music. I don’t think this is a Jaunty-specific problem though.
• Although the function buttons on my laptop still work, I no longer get any visual feedback when using them—before upgrading when I altered the volume a bar would appear on screen showing me the current setting. This isn’t a major problem as the functionality still works, but having no visual feedback is a bit annoying.

Other than those issues though—some of which I hope to look into and file bugs for—everything seems to be running fine. Now if only I could get Alien Crossfire to play under Wine…

For those of you who haven’t heard already, the latest version of possibly the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” was released earlier this week.

I’ve been an Ubuntu user for some time now, and it is without a doubt the best distribution for the desktop (I’ve used most of the major ones, so I can say that with some degree of experience). In fact, apart from the occasional problem with printing and wireless, I find that Ubuntu beats XP hands down for Just Working. Even my Vodafone 3g dongle works better in Ubuntu than it does in XP —no software to install and connection is much easier. If it wasn’t for the fact that people occasionally send me documents which don’t look right unless opened in the latest version of Word and I could get to grips with the Gimp as a substitute for Paint Shop Pro, I would probably delete XP altogether.

A word of warning before you rush to update though – make sure you read the release notes as there are a couple of irritating bugs. I was hit by the corrupt tracker index problem when I first logged in and it took me a while to figure out how to fix it. Hopefully the known issues will be fixed in the next few weeks though, so if you’re really paranoid you might want to postpone an upgrade until then.

I recently upgraded to the latest release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) and one of the first things I noticed was that the fonts in Firefox looked very odd, particularly on sites using sans-serif fonts such as Verdana or Arial (and their equivalents). At first this didn’t bother me too much, but over the course of a few weeks it became a real bug bear, and I was beginning to use my Mac or boot into Windows XP just to look at websites, which obviously isn’t ideal.

Fortunately, there’s a quick and easy fix for this problem—simply install the package ‘msttcorefonts’. You can do this via the graphical package manager (System->???????? ????? ????????Administration->Synaptic Package Manager) or using the command line with ‘sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts’. You might need to reboot your system after doing this, but it all seems to be working again for me.