Firefox 3.5 and Karmic Koala

A couple of things that I needed to say, first of all, Firefox 3.5 has officially been released! Woop! That is good. It is 2 times faster than firefox 3, 10 times faster than firefox 2 and it implements the new HTML 5

So I would advise you all to get it asap.

Second of all, an update on my sound issues with Karmic Koala…it has now completely died. It doesn’t recognise my sound card anymore. Really annoying…I’ll have to file a bug for this.

Sorry about all the posts I have posted today, but I needed to say these

A few predictions from earlier in the year

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see…

2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do. – Turns out I was right with this one. They have released the iPhone 3Gs already, halfway through the year
5. I will get my computer working again. – This one did happen, but I didn’t update you with it. I got my money back for my old motherboard, and bought a new one.
6.Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version. – Turns out this one is right as well, with the release today of the HTC Hero
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something. – This one happened as well. As we all know, it is called Karmic Koala
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough. – This one might happen soon, as we currently have the Beta 2 of Thunderbird, and mozilla don’t do many betas (ha…)

So, looks like a very successful year for me so far in predictions. More to come people…

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2

I have decided that I am going to go through the whole of Karmic Koala’s development, and will write bugs, and document my problems etc with it.

So, I just upgraded from Alpha 1 (in which nothing was different really…just a debian sync) to Alpha 2.

What happened now? My audio setup has been mucked up. Woop! I had a great pulseaudio setup with pavucontrol, and everything was working fine. Now…its gone back to only 1 output working. Which is kind of annoying. Will try and fix it and see if I can.

I have also notices that firefox 3.5 is in the repo now (although it is called firefox-3.1, even though the version number is 3.5b4).

Gnome 2.27.1 is the version now, but I can’t see anything different with it, and also the kernel has been updated to 2.6.30-5.6.

Apart from these things, I can’t notice anything else really new, but it is only the second alpha, so there should be lots more to come.

***EDIT***

Turns out the problem lies with firefox. I can have more than 1 app using my sound card. Unless one of them is Firefox. If firefox uses my sound card, nothing else can. And if something else is using my sound card, firefox can’t. But, everything else seems fine. Odd.

RANT: Pulseaudio? Why can’t we get it right?

Ok, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and, yet again, my audio set up really just doesn’t work. The first program that uses my sound, steals it. I’ve not figured out a way around this yet, but I will sometime.

I know, however, that this is not pulseaudio’s fault. It is Ubuntu. If I can direct you to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/fedora_11_review/ where they talk about Fedora and it’s pulseaudio implementation, which has just got better. They even have a cool application to turn specific application’s volumes up and down.

I have found very few people that have been complaining about sound in Fedora 10 or 11. But yet, we still can’t get pulseaudio even working in Ubuntu, never mind getting fancy features into it, like Fedora.

What is it that causes all these problems with pulseaudio in Ubuntu? I would love to know.

Windows easier than Linux?

First of all, I’m annoyed because I typed it all out and then clicked a close button. Stupid scribefire. It needs a thing which automatically saves. Grrr. Anyways, on with the blog…

Who ever said that Windows is easier than Linux. I’ll tell you who…someone who has never installed Windows without it being preinstalled. Anything is easy when you do that. Even Slackware would be easy as an OEM.

So, I set up a new computer at my church (and before you say something Steven I didn’t do it alone), and tried to install Windows on it. Started it up off the cd, and it went through the motions of formatting, and copying over the install files. It rebooted, and went through the motions of installing…well until it got half-way through and crashed. So I restarted the computer and it tried to install again…and crashed. Tried again…and it crashed again. This time tho, it didn’t start back into the files it had copied over, so I had to go back to the cd. 2 more tries, and it finally installed it.

Thank goodness, 4 hours installing and its finally there. Should be plain sailing from there, yeah? Ha…no. Course not.

So, I installed a couple of programs, then decided I wanted a driver for my Graphics Card, as I wanted it to run at a decent speed. Ha, silly me, wanting a graphics driver.

I went to the ATI website, downloaded the apropriate driver, and executed the executable. (Remember those things, ex-windows users…). It installed, and all seemed to go well, until I rebooted, and was told that my system was corrupt. Sorry…? Installing a Graphics Driver corrupted the registry??? Man alive…thats insane.

I have never seen something like that…I mean yes, occaisionally if you have a wonky card, or install the wrong driver, X won’t start, and you just have to uninstall it, and install a different one, and then it’ll all work. But corrupting the registry? Geez.

So, whoever said that Windows is easier than Linux, should install it from scratch.

Hacking

Ok, So I spent the other day helping our office manager to do something with her computer. Basically, her Sony Viao had shipped with 2 partitions, a 40 and a 30 GB partition, and she wanted it to be one partition. So basically, I told her I’d do it, but needed to back up her stuff. So I asked her if I could work out her password myself to get into it to back it up. She said yes. So out came the live-cd of the program I used (I only ever use it legally) and I amn’t mentioning the name because it is a worrying piece of software I don’t want just anyone to know about. Then, 300 seconds later, I had her windows password.

So I’ve been concious about hard security on my laptop for ages. If someone steals my laptop, then they can access everything, including my cookies and stuff. So, well, I have a few methods of securing my laptop to make it harder for someone to hack into it with hard access to my laptop. Not impossible to do it, but harder.

So, first of all, I have a BIOS password, and a different BIOS editing password, and it only boots to my harddrive as standard, so they have to know 1 password to get it to boot into my computer, and another one to change it so that it can boot from a cd, to run the hacking software or whatever.

However, the problem with a BIOS, is that it can be cancelled with just taking out the BIOS password, and put it back in, and the password is lost. So, then I obviously need a way of stopping someone loading up this live-cd and in 300 seconds having my root password, which is, incidentally different from my normal user profile. So, I decided to encrypt my disk. There is a program built into linux which allows you to encrypt a filesystem, so making it really really hard to decrypt it without the encryption key.

So, it isn’t fully secure, but then again, no computer system is.