Monday, August 21, 2006

Long time, no blog - Some time, long blog

Well it has been over almost two months since my last blog post.
I've been busy with all kinds of things, working, helping charity, having vacation, partying. But I thought it was time to add another post to my blog.

Two days ago I reinstalled my Ubuntu PC. I was still using an install which originated from an early beta, which I updated to another beta. Then I installed XGL using one of the nastiest methods and updated to another beta and finnaly to the stable after that.
Well the system was all sluggish and instable because of my crappy XGL install. So I decided it was time for a reinstall. And woopidoo, does this baby run like a charm now. This time without XGL.
I changed the human window theme because I was bored of it and I still affiliated the caramel color with a sluggish system :).
While browsing through the themes that come standard with every Ubuntu install I found one called Silicon, and man do I like it. I especially like the colors (grayish brown) of the title bar and the nice buttons on it, and of course the "not rounded shape" of the window borders.


Of course I was also bored with the fancy shining orange folder icons. So I decided to go with the Tango icon theme on which the Human icon theme is based. The button icons are almost all the same, and it has some nice mat blue colored folder icons.

The next day a friend of mine called me, and we were talking about some things and at one moment he said: "Oh by the way I just installed Ubuntu on a PC I had spare.". Ofcourse I was totally flabbergasted, because I didn't expect him to, so the duration of the phonecall got extended a bit (1.5 hours). I explained a lot of things, from where Linux comes from, where the Canonical gets its funds, who Mark Shuttleworth is, what philosophy drives most opensourcers have, how the community takes part in all this, etc, etc.
He got more and more interested and maybe Ubuntu has another (parttime) user. At one point in the conversation he asked me what KDE was and to what he could compare it (of all the things I told him). Well saying he could compare it with Gnome here would be a plain lie :). So my answer was: "Rommel" (Garbage). I told him it's a desktop environment like Gnome is, and explained him some of the differences. After like two sentences he was completely cured from the KDE idea.
While I was argumenting why Gnome and especially GTK are so great (although he is not an IT person, but a technician nonetheless), I got excited about using GTK again myself. So I decided to install MonoDevelop.The last version of MonoDevelop I installed, on my old Ubuntu install, was I believe a 0.8 and it lacked a lot of things one needs. But the 0.10 shipped with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake is pretty good, it lacks some things, but it is absolutely useful.

I'll wrap it up because this post is getting pretty long. Probably Ubuntu is getting another user, the father of one of my collegues is willing to give Ubuntu a shot. So I'm going to install Ubuntu on his PC coming thursday and friday and he will try it for a while and then decide to keep on using it, or maybe reverting back to Windows. One advantage is he is very open minded for inovation. He might just love Ubuntu ;).

To prevent these long posts in the future I will try to make some time to at least blog once every week.

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