Roedie’s Wonderful World of Whatever

My girlfriend is running Ubuntu on her computer. Because Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn was released yesterday I decided to upgrade to it right away.

The upgrade itself is actualy quite easy. You just make sure that your current installation (6.10) is up-to-date and after that you just tell the ‘update-manager’ to upgrade to the latest release. Very, very easy. The updater manages (almost) everything for you. I got 3 or 4 questions about config files which would be modified during the upgrade, but that was about it. After the upgrade I just had to reboot into the new kernel and everything seems to work fine. All in all, great work by the Ubuntu developers.

There was just one thing that annoyed me bigtime. During the upgrade you get this nice `Time Remaining` counter. I don’t mind those. But, when you implement something like that you must be damn fucking sure it’s working correctly. I hate nothing more than seeing `28 minutes remaining`for 15 minutes or so. And `1 minute remaining` for 10 minutes. It just reminds of those old microsoft installers in which 1-99% took 5 minutes and the last percent just took 30 minutes to complete. So please, remove it, or make it work.

My distro of choice still is Debian GNU/Linux. But for desktop usage with no hassle and not so experienced users, Ubuntu is the way to go.

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It’s not published daily, it’s not published weekly, it’s not published monthly… I just don’t get it when it’s published… But I do know that it’s hilarious when does get published. Everybody loves Eric Raymond…

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O freddled gruntbuggly…
…thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee,
my foonting turlingdromes.
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwards with my blurglecruncheon,
see if I don’t!

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A friend of mine is switching providers. Because of the old provider is ceasing it’s services we we’re moving his site to Amen.

At first, the provider seemed good. First of all, it’s cheap (which should have made me think…). Their site looks professional, they have a nice control panel and I see a lot of advertisements in the magazines I’m reading. So, my friend signed up for an account and we started migrating.

First, his site was much to large. That’s ofcourse his own problem… I don’t know anyone else having a site of 15GB!?. His Amen account is 5 GB which actualy should be plenty for everybody. I started uploading the site from our current webserver which is connected to a 100Mb connection. I’ve got a lot of experience with this server and we always get the 100Mb we pay for. But the upload to the Amen FTP server was going at a very slow rate of 120KB/s. At first I thought something was wrong with our current server… but no… uploading to Amen just doesn’t go any faster.

Second I tried migrating the MySQL database. I needed to create the database using the control panel. I tried to load the control panel but didn’t succeed. The page just got cut off while loading. After trying a couple of times it finaly loaded but it was f!cking slow… I created the database and was ready to import the data.

Third, I wanted to upload my dump of the database into the new one. I fired up my browser and tried to log in to their PHPMyAdmin web interface. And guess what… it wouldn’t load completely. After trying multiple times I gave. up until the next evening. The next evening it would load slowly and I was happy. I clicked ‘Import’ filled in the path to my sql dump when I noticed that I could only upload files up to 2 MB…. the database is around 50MB… When you get an amen account you get 500MB of space for your database. But how the fsck do you get it there?

My friend opened a ticket asking about this problem. The answer he got was that the limit is a default setting on the machine and couldn’t be changed. But no solution… He then asked againg. He was told that he should split the database in pieces and upload them… Well, I’ve got better things to do than splitting the whole thing in 25 parts and uploading them with 100Kb/s.

So, at this moment I think that Amen officialy sucks. Their support is in my opinion crappy. They don’t offer solutions and their network is teribly, teribly slow. Don’t go there.

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Wel as the title says… IT HAS HAPPENED!

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Today I finaly liberated my Ipod nano with Rockbox. Don’t know why I chose april the 1st to do this…

After flirting a couple of times with Ipod Linux and Rockbox I chose Rockbox. It seems a bit more functional and stable at the moment. Normaly I try to run Linux on everything I own, but Ipod Linux wasn’t just ready enough for me. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough.

The installation of rockbox on a nano is just plain simple. Download the code for your Ipod, download the fontpack and the ipodpatcher. Connect the Ipod to your computer, copy the contents of the zipfile to the the ipod and run the ipodpatcher. Reboot… done… easy.

One of the features I really like is that you can upload your log files to last.fm. This way I can finaly expand my musical taste with the use of last.fm.

The navigation through menu’s is a bit different than what you’re used to if you’re used to an Ipod. I somehow keep pressing the wrong buttons. Instead of using the menu and select buttons to go through menus you use the ff and rew buttons. This is a bit awkward at first but after using it for a while it’s more intuitive.

The standard Rockbox theme is ugly so I chose to go with a different theme. I set up the ipod Vision Real OSX theme which looks nice

I also like that I don’t need some tool to store music on my Ipod anymore. I just copy the music to my ipod and it works. No more Itunes (which is not available for Linux), gtkpod or whatever tool you can use for it. You can scroll through the files on your Ipod or use the Rockbox database for playing music.

Anywayz, I think I will have lots of fun with this and I recomend using it to everyone.

Screenshots (taken with phone):

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