Terminally Incoherent

I admit that I was pretty excited when I first heard about Dell shipping Ubuntu on their select machines. I figured that you can’t go wrong with a pre-installed tested system. However, since I haven’t bought one, or read any thorough, critical reviews I didn’t know how piss poor is their support.

If you read slashdot you probably seen this already, so forgive me for regurgitating this material. I’m kinda angry at Dell right now so I think it’s worth bringing it up even if it’s recycled news. Anyway, the story is that Walt Mossberg, a technology columnist for Wall Street Journal blogged his experience with the Ubuntu Dell and decided it’s not ready for the average Joe. Unfortunately Mr. Mossberg is what we in the know call a clinical case of complete fucking idiot - which is by the way, smack dab in the middle of the bell curve when it comes to tech competency. Most people are just dumb as dirt wen it comes to computers, and the only way to teach them how not to inadvertently break their own laptops is to forcibly insert knowledge into their skulls using blunt objects. So when I call Mr. Mossberg an idiot, I’m not doing this to offend him. I’m doing this to underline the fact that I don’t blame him for spreading the nasty FUD around like some Microsoft butt-monkey. I read his article, and I watched his video and I tell you - he just doesn’t know any better. So what you have here is a “complete idiot’s review of Dell-buntu” which is kinda refreshing, as it points out obvious stuff that doesn’t work while it should.

For example it seems that Dell is to cheep to pay for basic codec packs needed for playing various music and video formats. How come they don’t pre-load these machines with all the non-free shit that is not included on iso’s due to incompatible licensing? The fact that Ubuntu can’t ship with some of this stuff doesn’t mean Dell can’t. Hell they should - Windows boxes come pre-loaded with all kinds of garbage. Why can’t they install basic stuff? I mean people even make (poorly written) scripts like Automatix to make this process easier. Is it to much to expect from Dell?

Mossbergs other complaint is over-sensitivity of the touchpad, and lack of appropriate tool to regulate it. This is a blatant example of not fucking bothering to properly configure X or install the Qsynaptics package. How fucking hard would it be to put a link to Qsynaptics in the Gnome menu somewhere? Jesus Christ - that’s like 30 seconds of work. WTF Dell? Are you people even trying? You can’t just slap Ubuntu on a laptop and hope it will work, just like you can’t do the same with Windows.

Mossberg also mentioned shit kept crashing when waking up the laptop from sleep mode. I never experienced that issue because I don’t use Gnome but I believe him. ACPI on linux is pretty much Russian roulette. You never know if the system will wake up or crash unexpectedly. Honestly, I have no clue. This might be a Gnome thing, shitty support for ACPI in the Feisty kerner or something completely different. Still, this is something that could potentially be fixed by Dell in one way or another.

DVD support is, of course a lost cause. Mossberg of course is to clueless to know about the legal pile of fucking horse shit surrounding this issue so I guess we can forgive him. Ubuntu won’t play commercial DVD’s not because it can’t but because it is legally prohibited from doing so because of infinite stupidity of American entertainment industry. Not much we can do about this.

I have absolutely no clue why Mossberg claims he had to reboot to get his camera and iPod recognized. But I can’t comment here cause I do not own an iPod, nor have I tried getting my camera recognized on my work laptop. So maybe he is right, but once again - iPod support is something that could be achieved out of the box by preinstalling GTKPod package and making some appropriate entries in the fstab.

I’m not saying that Ubuntu is 100% ready for desktop use by your average techno-retatd. What I’m saying is that most of Mossberg’s complaints stem from sloppy and incompetent installation and system configuration by dell. It seems that they have decided to release the *buntu machines on the cheap without extensive testing of their installation procedures. Which is very sad. I always hoped that vendor installed Linux would ship with full hardware support, the most optimal X configuration possible and all the additional driver and helper packages required to run it. It seems that this is not the case, and dell just slaps the most basic Ubuntu image onto their drives without regard for user convenience.

I hate Comcast! Those fuckers are really getting on my nerves. I mean what the hell is this supposed to be? WTF?

I haven’t seen decreases speeds lately, but then again I don’t download that much. I was seeding files just yesterday, and my ratio was 1.6 on both big ISO’s. So perhaps this is just regional and not everyone has their traffic shaped with Sandvine yet. Anyone around here has Comcast? How are your torrent speeds lately?

Sigh… The day your ISP starts meddling with traffic shaping bullshit is the day you should start looking for a new ISP. And not just because downloading torrents will suck - because of the principle. No one is going to tell me what can or can’t I do with the bandwidth I pay for.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport $TORRENT_CLIENT_PORT –tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

I’m not kidding! Do not click this link. Just don’t do it. I can’t emphasize this enough:

This link, do not click it!

Now, how many of you clicked it without reading the rest of the post? Fess up! LOL Every time someone posts something like this, I fucking click that shit and then regret it. It’s irresistible, isn’t it?

This thing officially sucks. It sucks badly, and it is just a matter of time before someone exploits it. Come on Mozilla! Can we get some of that “10 Fucking Days” magic going on here?

Anyway, here is a workaround that works with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Windows XP:

1. Hit the Windows key to bring back your task bar
2. Double click on the FF entry in the task bar to minimize it and maximize it
3. This should bring the browser window into foreground. You can now finish whatever you wanted to do, and close the browser to get rid of the popup.

It worked for me. Your millage may vary.

Btw, if for some reason you can’t click out of the popup to see the article here is the safe link.

Happy 4th everyone! I hope you enjoyed the fireworks. For my readers from other parts of the world: today was a national holiday here in US. Every year, on 4th of July we celebrate the bravery of two great men: Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum who saved the world from an alien invasion!

We celebrate by shooting off fireworks as a symbol for when we blew up the alien ships with the fucking nukes! It is a very awesome holiday!

And yes, I’m going to make this joke every year, until it’s funny again.

It’s funny, but no one at my work got one yet, but they don’t seem to be able to shut up about it. As sweet as it might be I’m definitely not getting one because:

1. I have Verizon
2. I don’t want to pay $600 for a cell phone
3. I don’t have a data plan, and I don’t want to pay for one
4. Edge is slow, and if I’m in a wifi hotspot I’d rather use my laptop
5. I drop my phone - frequently
6. Version 2.0 is always better
7. I don’t even fucking own an iPod

But that’s me. How about you? Did you get one? Are you planning to get one? If you already have one, what do you like about it? What do you hate about it (and yes, there is surely something that you don’t like about it)?

I’ll leave you off with a Fail of the Month. This woman paid $800 to buy the first spot in the iPhone line, and then tried to buy $100k worth of iPhones (to sell on eBay), only to find out the stores have a one phone per customer rule.

WTF? It’s not a PS3 lady! Apple is actually a real company as opposed to Sony, which I hear was recently taken over by the Failbots from the planet Fail. You can actually order an iPhone online! Who the fuck is gonna buy it from you on eBay at inflated prices?