Untrained and Derailed

So there’s a lot of buzz about ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), the latest and greatest of the Androids, successor to the inimitable Gingerbread (Honeycomb being primarily for tablets, from what I’ve come to understand…)  Anyway, I was just happy to be running Cyanogenmod 7 (finally) on my Vibrant (also known as the Samsung Galaxy S) and puttering along quite happily, occasionally upgrading to a new CM7 nightly.

That all ended rather abruptly with Cyanogen announcing that he (and his team) were going to concentrate on pushing development for ICS.  I wasn’t too worried about it – I could’ve been perfectly happy with a solid CM7 installation until I upgrade my phone someday.  But the last nightly from the CM7 team was buggy, crappy, slow, and drained my battery like a 2 dollar hooker during fleet week.

I figured someone somewhere probably had a vanilla Gingerbread AOSP build for the Vibrant, so I popped over to the XDA forums to see what I could cram into it.  Something functional, yet basic.  I don’t go for the whole MIUI thing… and not just because I’m a UI snob; it’s just messy.

Well, lo and behold!  Apparently some kind developers have actually taken the new ICS release and compiled a beta ROM for the Vibrant.  I shoehorned that sumbitch right into my phone and followed all the instructions… and….. it sort of works.  Everything was shiny and new… and freakishly fast.  Very smooth, very attractive.  I’m very impressed with everything.  Except the phone doesn’t work.  Neither does GPS, but that’s hardly an issue since I’d resigned myself to never being able to use the GPS (as I’m sure every other Vibrant user in the world has done the same.)  I had to install the framework update (same page on XDA developers dot com, just a little bit below the V5 link) and everything’s working just great.  Except the GPS.  But who the hell cares about that anyway.

So: Ice Cream Sandwich!  I’ll post some thoughts about it once I’ve had a few hours to mess with it.  So far though, it’s worth looking into upgrading.  Muy bueno!

GIMP 2.7 is faaaan-tastic.  Huge leap forward, I really can’t wait for 2.8.  Sure it’s a little buggy here and there but the overall experience is great.  And it’s got single-window mode, a feature that I’m a big fan of.

So you’ve got Fedora and you want to install GIMP 2.7?  You gotta hunt around in Google a bit to get this info, so I decided I’d just compile it into one post cuz I’m like, nice or something.

First: Go to /usr/etc/yum.repos.d/

Type in:

sudo wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/luya/gimp/fedora-gimp.repo

If you don’t have wget installed, don’t worry: the shell will ask you if you’d like to install it so you can use it.  So considerate and friendly!  I remember when Linux used to yell at you for using unknown commands.  “Stupid noob! Why would you type that command?  I clearly don’t undersand it!”

Anyway, say yes.  Then try it again.  It’ll output some lines and tell you how successful it was.

Fire up Add/Remove and type in GIMP.  Select it for installation.  Alternatively you could also just type in (because hey, you’re already typing, might as well do it all):

sudo yum install gimp

Once done, fire up the GIMP and bask in the glory.  But wait, it’s still the same old GIMP!  Go to Windows->Single Window Mode.  Hooray for SWM!  It’s so fancy!  So clean!  So much less of a pain in the ass to use!  I actually kind of enjoy beating my head against GIMP now while I continue to struggle with it in my efforts to replace Photoshop.  It really is so many steps closer.

Hope this helps someone, someday.

Okay, back to work.

Ubuntu… Linux for noobs, yet a pleasant Linux experience nonetheless.  Friendly, happy to see you, it practically makes you coffee in the morning.  And for some reason, it always craps out whenever a new ‘version’ is about to come out.  As I read in another article recently, I’m not in Fanboy mode, I’m in User mode, and I need this laptop to ‘just work’.  Every time a new version of Ubuntu rears its head (11.10 being the upcoming beastie) I go through my updates and something inevitably buys the farm.  Painful?  Yeah, kinda.  It’s definitely a headache.

That being said, Ubuntu does provide one of the fastest, easiest, most painless entries into the world of Linux that I’ve experienced.  I’m impressed by it.  But I digress.

So an hour into the rubbing my ears and reminding myself that I really do *not* want to kick my laptop into component parts, I’m wondering why my hitherto oh-so-stable Ubuntu installation is now throwing up all kinds of errors, windows, and irritating artifacts.  Hours of research later, and I say screw it, I’m putting another distro on.  I’m a fan of apt and there’s an awful lot of support out there for it, so I decide to give Debian a try.  Ubuntu’s based on Debian, Debian’s been around since the dawn of man, and it’s all good.  Right?  Nope.  Debian effing sucks.  It has the old-ass POS gnome interface, nothing seems to work well on that either, and I was getting more and more frustrated.  I figured I could just change the interface to the new Gnome 3 (my favorite environment these days, though Unity does a great job too) and voila, I’d hammer out the details later.

But no, apparently I can’t do that.  Debian doesn’t support Gnome 3.  It’s much too awesome.

Okay, fair enough.  I give up on all these newfangled whateversauces and pull out my fancy Fedora 15 live disk, install it in like, 5 minutes, and I’m up and running again.  Yum is pretty much the same as apt, rpms just work, the shell is magical (though that’s nothing specific to Fedora), and Gnome 3 makes my heart skip beats.  I even have GIMP 2.7 running in single-window mode.

I hate all this distro-hopping. Back to work.

Yes, I know it’s Natty Narwhal.  I just prefer to call it Nappy Narwhal.  It makes me smile.  But enough about that… what I’m here to rant about is the latest EPIC RAP BATTLE between the two giants of the Linux world, the distributions with more rhymes than a father’s got psalms, Fedora vs Ubuntu!

Yeah, it’s a topic that has been discussed before.  To death.  But I think it’s time someone puts it in layman’s terms, because I read countless articles about it and frankly, I got a ton of “it’s all the same” crap.  And it’s not.  Not really.

I mean, deep down, I used to think “hey, they’re all the same at the core, it’s really just choosing a desktop environment”, which is incredibly, utterly wrong, because you can put any desktop environment (DE) you want on (almost) any distribution.  That’s kind of one of the neato things about Linux.  So if you’re traipsing through the interwebs and you run into (gasp!) a screenshot and a writeup of the super-secret Hobbit desktop environment, you’re not stuck with the desktop your distribution came with.  Sounds pretty simple and cool, right?  It is.  And apparently most people don’t know that.

But I digress.  I want to jot down a few notes between Fedora and Ubuntu.  Ready?  Here goes: Skip Fedora and use Ubuntu.  Done.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, you say.  Hold on, now, you say.  You’re totally crazy, you say.  Am I?  Yes.  But I’ve now had several experiences with both and am firmly convinced that if you’re into a smooth, unsullied Linux experience, Fedora is quite simply *not* the way forward.  It’s buggy, the system-update system doesn’t work right (ever), YUM is broken half the time, it’s a pain in the butt (and that’s putting it mildly) to properly install even the most basic stuff (like, for example, Google Chrome).  On the plus side, it’s fast, sure… but I don’t think it’s any faster than Ubuntu running the same DE.

“Oh, but Ubuntu has that crappy Unity interface,” you say, “and I hate Unity.  I really like Gnome 3.”  Roll on back a few paragraphs and experience the wonder of my words, where I tell you that not only is it possible to roll-your-own desktop environment… it’s a feature.  So you don’t like Unity, that’s fine.  You have no taste and can’t appreciate what I believe will become the de-facto Linux desktop experience.  Switch to Gnome 3.  Keep all the smoothness and support of Ubuntu.  It’s a win-win.

Just as an aside, I prefer Gnome 3 to Unity as well.  However, there’s no denying they’re very similar in approach and I can appreciate the ease of the Unity interface – it just needs polish, but it’s extremely mac-like and easy to get into.  Gnome 3 also needs polish, but I just like the way it ‘does’ things better… especially the workspaces thing, that’s just cool (a feature people have been bitching about since its inception.)  Anyway, try ‘em both and see how *you* feel about it.

I did it.  I swapped my entire blog over to WordPress from the Movable Type engine.  I made the switch, and I’m glad I did.

I know I’ve been threatening to do it for ages – heck, years – but I’ve always run into some obstacle or another that prevented me from getting busy.  Laziness, lack of time, technical reasons, or simply no reason to switch at all… every time I’ve tried to start the process I’ve backed down.  Until now.

I just closed my eyes and went to work.  The best part of all: it was freakin’ easy.  Really easy.  And painless.  The end result? Great speed, accessibility, efficiency, a great working interface, the templating engine is easy to work with, the plugin architecture is fantastic, well developed, and chock full of plugins… I mean, I could go on and on.  And maybe I will, once I have more time, but for now I’ll just say this: Drop that clunky Movable Type site and get into a modern, fast, better implemented WordPress installation.  You’ll be glad you did.