2008-04-28 Horny Hornet

"You mean Hardy Heron, right?" Yeah, whatever.

So, I updated to the latest Ubuntu version. Yay. My broadband plan only allows for 6 GB per month. Once they're used up it's back to dial-up speed for the rest of the month. Since April has apparently been a heavy traffic month, my notebook spent the last two days downloading its latest operating system with 7 KB/sec. My notebook is also my radio, my mp3 jukebox, my eBook, my scrapbook and my television. Which means that I usually put it on the bedside table to hear some music before I fall asleep. Unfortunately I don't have a wifi router, and the cable isn't long enough for the bedroom, so we (my notebook and I) go off line before we go to bed. But you can't go off line when you're downloading something, right? So we didn't.

In other words: I spent the last two nights sleeping on my couch, waiting for one gigabyte worth of Ubuntu being squeezed through a dial-up speed connection. And today was the big day. But it didn't work. Not properly, anyway. Some silly script was broken or at least expected to find a blackjack config file with Greek letters in it. It didn't take too well to the fact that I don't have any games on my hard drive. One basic package didn't make it and that screwed up a hell of a lot of dependencies. At one point, the update manager let me know that Nautilus isn't going to work later. There was also going to trouble with the Update Manager itself. So after one painful weekend the whole thing went into save recovery mode. Which also didn't work, because of the Greek file name again. I was a bit scared for a moment that my entire system was going to be inaccessible for the next week. But guess what: It worked!

I know! It's a miracle, but now I have the latest version of Ubuntu, and also Firefox 3. New icons (take a while to get used to), and a couple of new and fancy features to mess with. Of course my sound card still isn't working with factory settings, but at least I know what to do.

The one feature that stands out at first sight and made the whole update worth my while is a preview ("prehear"?) for sound files on the desktop. Hover your mouse over an mp3 file and instead of a useless tool tip you will now hear the song. Very nice idea.