Ubuntu

I finally broke down and got Minecraft, even though I think Minetest is fairly excellent and getting better. Even though you pay Mojang for the game, making it polished takes at least a couple of mods and making it really slick takes a few more. I wrassled around with minecraft on Linux and found a decent set of bits which make the game pretty fancy. This guide assumes you've got minecraft successfully installed, but not too much else.

Thanks, Ubuntu, for producing a tool that performs unattended updates and calling it unattended upgrades. Was hiding the fact that you don't do unattended upgrades a key feature or just a bonus?

Recently I decided to give XBMC Live a try as the alternative to making my own Ubuntu install. I figured they might have it worked out to go a little faster. It looks as though I was right, and it's a great install so far as I can see, but I also discovered that they left out bluetooth. As probably the best cheap option for a good remote is a used Playstation 3 remote available at a gamestop near you for thirty bucks or less, this seems like an unfortunate omission. As I want to use a Logitech MX5000 keyboard hooked up to an MX900's USB Bluetooth dongle/mouse charging cradle, it was especially annoying.

If you're an Ubuntu user who would like to try out the Oneiric Ocelot, but would like to not get cut by the bleeding edge, this might be a good time to give it a go. For me, anyway, it's just begun to work correctly including the nvidia driver, proper shutdown, and so on.

Ubuntu has set the system clock to UTC since the Intrepid Ibex (8.10.) I didn't notice because I had upgraded through several other versions. Using UTC for the system clock is cool if you don't dual-boot, but I do. The functionality exists in at least Vista and later to use UTC for the system clock, but I'm using XP and don't trust it to work even if it appears to.

Half-life 2 gave me a black screen on Maverick until I upgraded to latest nVidia from ubuntu-x-swat x-updates PPA, and wine1.3 from ubuntu wine team PPA. Before the update from wine 1.2 (from the regular Maverick repos) I also installed directx9 with winetricks (from the repos also.) Presumably those files are still in my wine setup.

When I switched to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) I discovered that the team-xbmc PPA did not provide any packages for Lucid. The answer, as found from sources too numerous to mention (Try google) is the team-xbmc SVN PPA.

While my experience to date with Ubuntu 10.04 has been mixed, I have found one compelling reason to employ it, at least for owners of laptops based around AMD's Athlon L110 and RS690 chipset, like my Gateway LT3201u: it has working power management support. This processor does not support typical power-saving methods, i.e. manual frequency scaling; instead, it provides support for AMD PowerNow! in the form of multiple idle states.

I've been running Chromium on Ubuntu from the daily-build repository but recently it started failing to reach google when performing searches, so I switched to older builds via the beta builds archive. If your goal is to have a usable browser rather than to perform the valuable service of testing dailies, you should consider doing likewise.