I upgraded Ubuntu last night – piece of cake and it’s looking pretty smick. Haven’t had much of a chance to play around with it, but I do like the fact that it has Firefox 3 and I look forward to giving the new Bit Torrent program that comes as standard.

I only have one quam, and it’s a small one. My sound still doesn’t work again so I’ll have to do this again. But it’s a good opportunity to give Akira‘s suggestion a go.

I think it’s the third upgrade I’ve done on this laptop. Haven’t had to do a clean install yet and everything is working fantastically.

There’s been a lot of talk around the interwebs about this particular distro finally being able to take on the Microsoft juggernaut and with Visa being a shit as it is, you just never know.

… and while we’re on it, a follow up point to this conversation. Visa is shit so hopefully it will be the death knell for Microsoft. Which basically leaves Linux and OSX. OSX won’t win the distro wars because it’s built for Mac hardware. You’ll never run Mac OSX on a generic computer – or at least not in any main stream manner.

So the winner is Linux!

Thanks to FOSSWire (a blog I should have added to my RSS feeds a long time ago), there is now an Ubuntu Cheat Sheet.

Read about it here, or download it here.

I’m having an argument with a friend (kinda). We both agree that Microsoft is the source of all evil (if only they’d show us the source). But he maintains that OSX is the be all and end all and that Linux is not user friendly. It’s great that you can ‘tweak’ it but that’s not what he wants. He just want’s something that is easy to use.

Firstly, I think that it is a myth that OSX is so user friendly and ‘intuitive’. What does that even mean when you are talking about operating systems? Intuitive means that you’ve figured it out, finally. I also think that OSX backs it self a little too much, in that it assumes it has done the right thing and I always find it hard to track down those misplaced files.

However, the more important point here is that many Linux distro’s are actually really user friendly and easy to use these days. I suspect the ongoing concern is that you (generally) can’t buy Linux preinstalled. But these days, installing Linux is sometimes even easier than installing Windows.

Anyway, this article makes the point better than I:

If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it’s that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can’t ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue.

Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days, but Ubuntu, the user-friendly distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical Ltd., has made a mission out of dispelling such complaints entirely.

You can now download a beta of Ubuntu’s 8.04 release, more commonly and affectionately known as Hardy Heron (the follow-up to Gutsy Gibbon and Feisty Fawn). Final release is set for April 24.

This shits me:

Eight teenagers have been arrested and charged with beating another teen in an “animalistic attack” so they could make a videotape to post on YouTube.

And then the Sheriff’s comment:

“They lured her into the home for express purpose of filming the attack and posting it on the internet.”

Do you think though, that maybe, there were some pre-existing issues? Do you think that, given the crime, it would have happened if YouTube was not available to the perpetrators?

You’d think that people just weren’t violent before the internet. That somehow they though “You bewty, now that there’s this YouTube thing, I’ll go beat someone up so I can put it up on the site.”