Runnin Good... Hardy Loves eMachines Lappy

Well the install was pretty uneventful. Setting up wireless was different. I no longer needed the windows driver or ndiswrapper. The ristricted driver saw my hardware and with a reboot I had wireless. My only complaint is that it's a 1 MB/S connection. Now, that doesn't really seem to make any practical difference as it downloads and streams video/music just as fast as always. I would however like it to show a faster connection.

All my usual apps. installed without a hitch and I moved my data from the old home folder to the new one. The machine seems to be a little faster but nothing to blow your socks off. However Firefox 3 is much faster and nicer to use.

Under Gutsy, I always had an annoying issued with sound playback. It would skip at about a 3-5 second interval and continue until playback was stopped. This would happen on nearly every media player except that I had NO PROBLEMS with exaile music player and MPlayer Movie Player. Any thing else and it was an issue...

With Hardy 8.04 installed, I have no more sound issues on this machine.

It seems that something was improved with ALSA or perhaps that now it's running PULSE AUDIO that was the fix. I don't know, but I'm loving it so far...

MUFFY UPDATE: Muffy delivered 7 healthy kittens 3 days ago.... Anyone want a Kitten?

eMachines m6809 - Hardy x86 Install

I'm backing up my personal laptop right not using Acronis TrueImage. When I'm done, I plan to move my home folder to a save place and then I'm going to wipe the Gutsy partition in preparation for a clean install of Hardy. My current setup runs so well that I've been putting this off, but I can't resist anymore. If it runs like crap or something, I can just restore my disk image and the laptop will never know it was violated. I hope... I'll report back after the install.

Checking in... Muffy escaped...

I'm just checking in because I haven't posted in a while. Hardy is running well on my desktop but I sure wish a couple of bug fixes would come through. The Pulse Audio vs. Flash Audio bug is a little annoying. The bug where I can't launch my media player is very annoying too. I didn't think the media keyboard button meant so much to me until I didn't have it. Isn't that the way with everything though? I guess I'll just have to wait.

Muffy escaped...

Our cat Muffy is VERY pregnant so we are keeping her in the house that she and kittens will be safe when the birthing day comes. Tonight my daughter left the back door open for a few minutes and she escaped... The great cat hunt was on. Luckily she comes running when the wife calls. After spending about 30 minutes searching the house and the yard, Joy started calling for her. We looked over the back privacy fence and there she was... Too fat to jump back over the fence. My daughter Ericka climbed over the fence and lifted her across. She's back in the house none the worse for the adventure.

That's about it for now. I'll blog more when something good... Oh Wait!!! I forgot. Joy passed her final exams and is finally done with Chemistry and Biology. That was a great thing. She did very good and I'm VERY proud of her achievements. I love you honey...

Hardy Updates

Well, I'm really liking Hardy Heron aside from some already mentioned bugs. I learned today that unlike previous versions of Ubuntu it really is best to leave the "Proposed Updates" tab unselected in the software sources repositories. The proposed updates that I installed today broke my gnome panel and it wouldn't boot properly either. Luckily I always keep a recent disk image of my latest working system. It only took me about 10 minutes to revert back to a clean working system. Then I removed the proposed updates from my repository list. I had such great luck with the proposed updates under Gutsy Gibbon that I'm a little disappointed.

I also filed a bug report today on "Glipper" clipboard manager/buffer. I kept crashing on reboot and I would have to delete it from the panel and reinstall the applet to make it work again. After reverting to an earlier install of Hardy without the proposed updates however, I'm not having any more problems from it. I'm not sure if Glipper is a problem or if it was the updates that caused the problem. I have had troubles with Glipper before so I think the bug report is in order.

ScribeFire is once again installed on my main system. I'm using it right now to make this blog entry. Since it seems to check and hook into the blog every time the browser is launched I'll disable the extension when not in use. Having it active all the time slows down page loading even when it's not in use.

I'm been experimenting with changing my usplash themes using startup manager. It's really interesting but having problems with Hardy. My Gutsy install on the laptop is looking really good. On Hardy I had to revert to the default to get things working properly.