Ubuntu

I should have blogged a while ago about this, but didn't get around to it till now...

I decided a few months ago that I wanted to have an Ubuntu hour in Cape Town, as most of them happen out in Stellenbosch, and I don't really get the time to drive out there. In true open source style, if you want something done you need to do it yourself (not in a negative sense though, it's more like a self-help style thing), so I started organising it.

Choqok seems to be about the only native microblogging client for KDE. It's actually a rather nice app, but I've found it to be rather buggy when it comes to Twitter authentication. For the last few months it has moaned about not being able to authenticate, after which it crashes. Starting the app again does the same thing, which means it crashes constantly, and you're left without a Twitter client.

After the Ubuntu-ZA site went down, David Rubin wanted to organise to have the site redone. As a long-time helper with the site, he asked me what my thoughts were, and we agreed that a wiki was possibly not such a great idea, especially when the Ubuntu wiki contains a lot of helpful information already, and our wiki was mostly being used for news and static content. We thought that it was possibly duplicating content from the Ubuntu wiki, and therefore there wasn't much use in making the site a wiki.

Yesterday I had to buy a new printer because my old one packed up over the weekend. Since I run Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux exclusively at home, I needed a printer I could be sure would work in Linux. This means that generally I need to get either HP or Epson printers. I've had both makes of printers before, and they've both served me well, so I have no problem being "limited" to those two.

With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10 there has been a spate of negative publicity for this latest release, with a lot of people bemoaning broken upgrades and various other installation issues. Having only had 1 failure out of 7 upgrades, I thought I'd blog about my experience with the upgrade, and my thoughts on the new version of Kubuntu (since that's the particular flavour of Ubuntu that I use).

After seeing my last post, Michael Gorven pointed me to a couple of articles discussing RubyGem and Debian's policy. I did a bit of googling after reading those articles and some others around Ruby and package management systems, and found an article on using easy_install with Debian.

So I did say I was going to both blog about my installation of the Huawei E272 and then post it on the CLUG wiki. My apologies for not having done this sooner, I've had a few other things on my plate.

Please update your Linux version. I don't run an rpm-based distro (indeed, the most popular distro for the last 3 or 4 years has been Ubuntu, a deb-based distro), and the 2.4 Linux kernel was thrown out with the rest of the cruft years ago.

Thanks.

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