Is Ubuntu for human beings?
I'm not really Ubuntu person, before Ubuntu, I've never even run Gnome for more then an hour. Mostly I've been running simple customizable window managers like FVWM, WMii and Xmonad. KDE and Gnome seem to me just to damn complicated. But I have strong background with Debian which Ubuntu is build on. Since forever all servers that I've run for example at Netrunner are Debian based.
So almost two years ago I've decided to give Ubuntu a chance at my work laptop, as I shouldn't worry much about my work desktop environment and just focus on the job that had to be done. This is what is being advertise by mass media around and I've fallen into it.
My journey started pretty smoothly, that was 9.10, and for the time being I was pretty happy about it. I've missed some tiling managers features, but I've decided that I will not spend time working on desktop and so not to implement them ( you can run Xmonad as window manager for Gnome ). With time something weird happened. Since 10.04, instead of getting better with every release, things started to break bit by bit. First my Ipod stopped syncing with Banshee. I'm big podcast listener, so I depend upon syncing almost every day ( Rhythmbox support for podcast is just not there ). That was a big deal breaker, but I've managed to write my own sync with a help of BashPodder. Then came Gwibber which started to crash randomly, that part was never important for me so I've just ignore it. Oh yeah and Empathy was refusing to reconnect when coming back after laptop suspend, you have had to restart it. Next thing that I've ignored replaced by Ekg2 running on remote server with autossh, at least it was reconnecting ;-)
With 10.10 a new problem surfaced, connection to corporate exchange. Exchange Evolution plug in just stopped working. I've seen some solution for it, but original bug was still there, I've decided also not to use IMAP connection from Evolution ( cause for that I have many other - better clients ) and switch to something that I feel more comfortable with, Mutt.
So here I was, running 11.04, with Xmonad and none of the programs from original Ubuntu Gnome stack.
Conclusion? My laptop got replaced and so Ubuntu. I came back to Debian with Xmonad where I've started. I totally don't get Ubuntu way of getting new release and worry about bugs later, cause from my perspective bugs in this distribution are never fixed. For all of those problems or I've created bugs on Launchpad or subscribed to already open ones. Most of them are still open and not fixed and most of them are Ubuntu specific, for example Exchange plugin always worked on Debian and actually one of the workarounds was to install original package. It's not a rant against Ubuntu in general cause I know many happy (L/Kubutu) users and they do awesome marketing for Linux on desktop but rather a dis for default choices that have been made. None of the default stack ( well besides Firefox ) is stable enough to give it to your mother and what is even more puzzling there isn't enough attention to fix those. Some people my be happy with default Ubuntu, but then or they are power users / developers who can fix those problems or just regular users who barely use something more then a browser and a text editor.
Are you bad ass ?
Ninjas are pretty much responsible for hardest and glories game in history, but they are notorious for President capture!
Boxee Box upgrade
For everyone that followed my Boxee tutorial about set up on AsRock 330 ION good news cause upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 went smoothly, and as support to 9.10 will shortly end I advice everyone to do it.
There was one glitch which is again remote controller and again lirc needs to be patched.
Console Radio Player
I've improved/updated/translated bash script that I'm using for playing online radio. It mostly consist polish channels ( like trójka, zetka, euro itd ) and some international ( somafm ). I don't know where I took it from originally but all contributors that I've remembered been included. If you have any channels to add, do it, change the code and let me know so the base can grow.
My Boxee Box
I was always fighting with my perfect home-theater idea, most of my setups based on low end devices that suppose deliver something always were failing here and there. On the other side I've always want to have a development server that I can upload my small projects (a real *nix box sitting in the corner) and maybe a backup then as well (through rsync). In the last year I was looking at couple projects like MythTV and XBMC, but still part missing here was hardware. Having desktop kind PC, just blowing air is not something you would like to have your livingroom (and it's not making your family happier) but rather on desk or hidden somewhere in the cabinet.
But finally I've found a box and a software that fulfill my needs with Boxee and Asrock ION 330 nettop.
Why Boxee? First of all I was looking only on open source software and basically there are two good players left on the field Boxee and XMBC as I see now. Well... almost, cause they are basically the same software (Boxee is build on top of XBMC). Boxee looked like most straight forward, plays any format I can think of, do video & audio rss and have tons of apps. It caught my eye for some time as I was waiting for original Boxee Box which look pretty awesome. But still time will come to check out XBMC and possibly Moovida (previously Elisa, Fluendo project). I'm not taking MythTV under consideration cause I'm not interested in recording.
Why Asrock? It's a slick device, small, quiet but still powerful for this particular need. Easily handle 720p and possibly 1080p video files ( can't test it, my TV can do only 720p ) and HDMI output. My version ION 330 HT comes with 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD and ... ir remote. Enough and remote is nice extra feature that I would buy anyway. All for less than 300E.