Yeah, computers

Who's ready to rock and roll?!

Well, too bad. You're reading a blog post instead.

Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named "Intrepid Ibex") came out last Thursday, but I didn't make the time to upgrade for about a week. I was a bit hesitant as I usually am, especially since my friend Mark told me that the update messed up his computer quite a bit. I forget what it did, but it was something scary.

Like last time, I decided not to rely so much on the servers for the upgrade because I figured they would probably still be smashed due to the traffic. While I was home for the weekend, I downloaded the alternate installation CD image via BitTorrent (which I can't do from my dorm room). When I was ready to upgrade, I mounted the CD image as a CD (details here), thus eliminating the need to burn a physical CD. This saves me time and makes Mother Nature happy.

Still, upgrading your operating system is a little scary. I fear for the safety of my computer and my data the same way a parent might fear for his or her child. The horror stories, like Mark's, do nothing to help. But usually, everything turns out fine, and things seem to have turned out fine this time. Each release of Ubuntu has a few annoying bugs that are (hopefully) fixed in the next release. Fortunately, Intrepid seems to fix more than it introduces.

First, the new quirks. Intrepid relies less on the xorg.conf file, so when it reset my default keyboard layout, I had to look up how to change it. There's a semi-graphical way to do this sort of thing now. You have to enter sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, go through every screen, wait while the computer thinks, and then reboot. Well, maybe you just have to restart X, but I usually reboot when that's called for. I also wanted to edit my actual keyboard layout file. It had moved from /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

GNOME has a new "guest session" feature that creates a temporary account that doesn't have access to anything important. This would be handy if someone needs to use your computer real quick. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Good thing people don't need to use my computer real quick very often, I guess.

Recently, I figured out how to enable gapless playback in Rhythmbox. In Intrepid, this gives me a problem when I'm listening to albums or playlists. Rhythmbox stops playing the last song of the album or playlist just before it's over. The only solution I've been able to figure out so far is to turn gapless playback off.

During the upgrade, I was prompted about overwriting several files. They had to do with the fixes I implemented for this nasty hard-drive killing bug that I thought should have been fixed now. It turns out that the bug hasn't been fixed, so I tried this fix suggested on the Ubuntu Forums. It seems to work.

And now some good things in Ubuntu 8.10, in no particular order:

• There's an option to allow sideways scrolling with the touchpad. I don't know if this is new, but I've never seen it before.
• Ubuntu 8.04's infamous Adobe Flash/PulseAudio bug is no more. Now I can watch Flash videos without worrying about Firefox crashing. This is really, really, really good. Really.
• The new version of GNOME puts less space between lines when listing things such as files. This saves space in a lot of places, including Pidgin's "Buddy Details" view.
• Keyboard controls: I'm once again able to change the volume (I don't even know when that stopped working), and some of the sensitivity in changing the screen brightness that was lost in Ubuntu 8.04 is back.
• The Wi-Fi light once again lights up if a signal is detected.
• Audacity isn't at all sluggish or uncooperative like it was in 8.04.
• For the first time, the desktop effects actually seem to work. My graphics driver hasn't been up to the task in the past, but things seem to be going pretty smoothly with this release. I haven't had a freeze yet.

Overall, it looks like 8.10 is a big improvement over 8.04.

On Flickr, here's a photoset of Barack Obama before, during, and after his election night speech. The behind-the-scenes photos are especially interesting. I like this one of Obama watching McCain's concession speech on TV. The photos aren't very large, but they're licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

A probably out-of-date link from our own reader Daniel: Will You Go To Homecoming With Me? Aw, how cute.

Advice I should follow: How to Be Interesting. I already do two of those ten things, so maybe I'm 20% interesting?