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My spare time is precious. So although I'm running Debian "Sid" (the developer/unstable) branch and am willing to help fix bugs I'm easily annoyed by flaws in software that haven't been fixed in years. One of them is the proprietary driver for nVidia graphics cards. In Windows I love these cards because a 100€ upgrade to an nVidia GTX 550 Ti made me play Skyrim in high resolution and with a good framerate. These cards are massively powerful.
And now for something completely different. At my employer we have a few users working on a MacBook voluntarily. I have never used a Mac seriously before. Given the chaos of Gnome 3 and the increasingly unhappy Linux desktop crowd I thought it's time to check it out to see what the Mac users love about it and learn a few lessons. Of course this won't be a fair comparison nor in in-depth review - I just spent two hours with a borrowed MacBook to get an impression and here it is.
I've always been enthusiastic to show people the advantages of using a Linux desktop. KDE 3.5 accompanied me for many years until some ill-conceived KDE 4 ate my spare time and finally made me switch to Gnome 2 - after all we open-source people have a choice. Gnome 2 became more featureful and Ubuntu perfected the installation. There are times I deliberately toy around with my operating system. But when I needed to get work done it was Ubuntu. I could rely on it.
On my laptop I'm running Debian Wheezy (the current "testing" branch). I used to run Ubuntu on it for two years and loved it. But without scroll bars, with the annyong Unity desktop and some especially annoying bugs with the new Xorg that kept bitching when I undocked the laptop and didn't understand two screens of different sizes I went back to the roots. That worked well for two months and I even installed every updated packages. But recently I started to hear bleeps and echos and noise in videos played in Firefox^WIceweasel. Took me a while to find the cause for that.
After months of struggling with Bacula, a bitchy tape drive, a huge slow catalog database and a broken controller I finall give up and remembered that making a backup of personal data should be KISS. Follow my article on using rsnapshot with inexpensive external USB drives.
In the previous chapter you have fed the MySQL database. Now it's time to make use of it. The entry point for all email on your system is Postfix. So we need to tell Postfix where to find the database-stored information. Let's start by telling it which virtual domains you have.
Finally I have found a way to create screencasts in Linux. Within Debian I didn't get it working at all. But under Ubuntu the "Desktop Recorder" (aka gtk-recordmydesktop) finally gave me a working OGG video file. Hooray. The first screencast I have recorded deals with the Zabbix monitoring software. Enjoy.
This weekend I decided to move mandatory work aside and as a fun project move workaround.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. I was very enthusiastic about all the shiny news things that I remembered from former discussions and announcements. Finally all the essential modules like Views and Panels would be built-in. No more installing FCKeditor with IMCE that takes one day until it stops bitching about permissions and finally allows image uploads.
Yesterday I had the doubtful pleasure to install Windows on a laptop. And while I didn't spent much love customizing it I at least needed a decent web browser. As someone put it the Internet Explorer is the "best browser for downloading a better browser". :) Okay, the default search engine is Bing. So let's search for "Google Chrome". And what did I see?
After a period of not-being-in-the-mood of coding due to time constraints I'm finally looking forward to get my IDE up and refactor a web application I wrote with Pylons and jQuery. I'll try Pyramid and ExtJS this time and will see if it helps overcome some limitations of a workflow application. jQuery is nice for pimping web sites but for a serious bureaucracy data management application it's not offering enough power.
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