i.justrealized

I’ve been working a little more in Ubuntu these days. I found it to be slightly faster. Especially with the performance of NetBeans. It’s a joy to work with NetBeans. In Windows Vista, it’s shit slow. I don’t know why, it’s probably due to all the overheads from the services launched during start up.

I feel lighter now.

The funny thing is that I got more productive in Ubuntu not because it’s a better platform in terms of functionality but just because there are lesser distractions. Most of my leisure stuff are in Windows Vista. I use Windows Live Messenger so often there. In Ubuntu I don’t like Pidgin and I miss my custom emoticons, hehe1.

I auto-hide the rather useless bottom panel which only use twice a day and rely most on keyboard shortcuts. I also enabled the Windowlist screenlet and use it as a taskbar replacement.

Ubuntu’s still hard to use

• I hate exploring my folders so I don’t explore folders much any more.
• There’re too many clicks involve in organizing my files so I never download anything any more.
• Finding music in my Windows hard disk through Ubuntu is so hard and I don’t know how to create a link to directly link to me the folder.

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Wikipedia which ran a mixed of Red Hat and Fedora Linux servers are chosen Ubuntu Linux.

Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.

Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers. (Source: Arstechnica)

This is good new for Ubuntu which has in the past experience slow adoption rates with their server flavors. I am glad to add that this blog is powered by Ubuntu Hardy.

On tech news today, Symbian adopts the Eclipse Public License, set up the Symbian Foundation and went opensource.

Industry leaders to unify the Symbian mobile platform and set it free

…industry leaders are coming together to establish Symbian Foundation, to bring to life a shared vision and to create the most proven, open and complete mobile software platform - available for free. To achieve this, the foundation will unify Symbian, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) software to create an unparalleled open software platform for converged mobile devices, enabling the whole mobile ecosystem to accelerate innovation.

The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments.

The platform will be free and open to develop on from the start whether you are enthusiast, web designer, professional developer or service provider. To develop on the platform you will not need to be a member of the foundation. The Symbian Foundation’s developer program will provide a single point of access for developer support; providing a wide offering of tools and resources. (Source: Symbian Foundation)

Symbian is used by Nokia. It’s like Apple has the iPhone, Microsoft has Windows Mobile and even Google’s coming up with something too. Symbian’s having a rather unexciting future with all the other platforms (especially the iPhone) making news every now and then.

For years Nokia kept the OS closed and all of a sudden they open it. And why’s that so? Because they used it enough already, they earned their cash and they finally decide to share. This news would have been more exciting if released years ago, not anymore.

Third day straight in Ubuntu. The lack of oxygen and the familiar ALT-Tab interface made breathing hard. Half the population has already been wiped out and an enemy space ship appeared out of no where to hold some of us hostage, I had to sacrifice my brother to escape being a hostage.

Anyway, Ubuntu turned out okay. Most of my annoyance is due to familiarity with Windows.

• Double clicking on the top-left hand icon did not close my window
• Yeah, I am still pressing the Windows button 7 times in the day and 12 times when I’m blur at night. Each time I do that I feel stupid, it’s like attempting to push open a door that says ‘Pull’. Intelligence minus 10.
• Can’t undo a deletion of file easily through Nautilius
• Whoever told me using Ubuntu is just like Windows hasn’t used either or both of the operating systems.
• Still pressing F6 in Firefox to highlight the awesome location bar
• Pidgin doesn’t yet support custom emoticons. I’m sure Uzyn would call this a feature.
• The default font gives me a headache, I had to change it to Lucida to feel a little better.
• GIMP… Okay, nevermind that already. It already received enough bashing.
• I like the most recently used programs to be display on the start menu. Sure I can always put them on my desktop manually but when you’re talking about a better overall experience, the OS ideally should be able to discover the user preference and suit the user without him or her knowing about it.

Windows does almost everything Ubuntu can do. User-interface-wise Ubuntu is still poorer. I hand Ubuntu to my father to use and he prefers Windows. My father touched neither of them. He like the Windows Teletubby land wallpaper and more attractive icons and also says he likes Windows’ Firefox. He somehow didn’t like the Ubuntu one. It’s the colors somehow and I just let him have Windows XP in the end.