Stupid non-related musical hooks from my childhood aside, what did I think of the film?

Well we went to watch it at a late screening. If you have trouble keeping concentration, I cannot reccommend doing this in the slightest. By the end of the film, you’re plugged into the story at a rediculous depth. It took me an entire sleep to snap back to reality. It’s like a really strong drug.

So what happens? Well a load of unknown actors and actresses are engadged in an action-packed team-work based fight to complete a job so the main charater can go back home to his kids. Why can’t he get to his kids from the start? Because he’s wanted by every force in America, obviously. And some rich guy they do a job for can solve this. Obviously.

I hope I haven’t given too much away. It’s like the Matrix but far less geeky. And it’s not as long. I’m pretty sure they can’t make a sequal for this either, so if you’ve got a spare few hours you should see it. I can’t reccommend it enough. Just please, make sure you’re not stupid tired or having mental issues at the time, or it will mess you up.

The White Noise Festival is an event organised by the guys at Maybeshewill and the Firebug. It features some simply awesome bands with a mix of post-rocky and musically unusual performances. It’s surely Leicester’s music forte.

Like I’ve already said, the highlight for me were Herra. I’ve been following this band since they we’re in college, and their brief split last year broke my heart.

You have to check them out- Here’s a link to their MySpace. I truly recommend you turn up to one of their shows, because my shit copy-writing skills can’t do such an epic performance justice.

There were other very worthy bands playing too, but these guys scratch my musical back just the way I like it.

Ubuntu is heading for a milestone. In April they will release the latest version of their Operating System called Lucid Lynx. Every 6 months Ubuntu release a new version but this one will be a Long Term Support release, a version that is released every 2 years and supported for 3 years. This might not sound a long time (especially if you’re using the 9-year-old Windows XP) but in this modern world of the Internet and technology- it seems forever!

So what’s changed?

Well the thing that’s got e everyone in a fuss is the re-branding. Ubuntu previously sported a very friendly look, using “very large, almost Comic sans MS” font as I once described it. Now it’s moved on, and even the OS theme has been given a reboot.

When I first saw this screen-shot I described it as “overall looks like vomit”, but after installing the theme, turning the fonts down to 8px and using it for a few weeks, I love it. It’s beautiful.

The title-bar buttons being on the other side doesn’t bother me- I think I’ve gone to click on the right-hand side by accident three times in total so I’ve no idea what all the geeks out there are fussing about. I love the use of monochrome icons and the purple is certainly a lot better than the dullness of the brown previously used. If I could change anything about the new theme it would be the sprites used for the scroll-bars (I think they look a bit amateur-ish) and the buttons I think are too dark.

All in all- congratulations to the Ubuntu team. Looking good

Links
Brand – Ubuntu Wiki
LTS – Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Branding revealed – Ubuntu forums
Inital Ubuntu forums poll

Rather than do the bi-annual Windows XP clean install, I ripped a disc and jammed in the latest Ubuntu. Karmic Koala it’s called.

This is the first time I’ve installed Ubuntu as opposed to Ubuntu Studio. Installation was a bit daunting. It does it all through the Live CD but it has to boot up like that first, and it took a while. I left it with a black screen for a few hours, came back to it, and selected “Install” off of the desktop.

After that it went okay. There were a few issues.

Look ma, no wires!

Getting the wireless working was the same as on my garage PC. I go through this NDIS Broadcom wireless walk-through and it works like a charm. NDIS is Windows driver and I’d rather use native Linux ones, but it works and that’s ultimately all I care about

I can see clearly now!

After all the trouble getting nVidia binaries working on Ubuntu Studio Jaunty (with the real-time kernel) I wasn’t looking forward to any graphics driver installation. As with the wireless, the graphics are also very similar (Gefore 5 and 6 series). However, the binaries in Ubuntu Studio Karmic worked fine straight away fresh out of the Hardware Drivers GUI (a tool for installing 3rd party binaries). Thankfully, it was the same on Ant’s PC. Nice one Karmic

Notifications kept popping up down a bit too far. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but I found an Ubuntu forums post to sort it out (again, still searching for that link ).

What did you say?

Then we had sound issues. I tried multiple Ubuntu forum tutorials trying to get it working but no luck. The first problem was how distant the sound was. I wasn’t getting the right frequencies, any stereo field and MP3 compression sounded crap. Turns out I’d dislodged the speaker’s mini-jack

My bro tried out Battle for Wesnoth, having played it on an openSUSE distro I’d tried out years ago. No sound though. I followed a simple Ubuntu forums tutorial linking to a blog post, fired up a deb file and got it up and working in seconds! (I’ve misplaced the link for now but I’ll keep searching for it!)

Jerk, jerk, jerk!

So with the sound almost fixed, there was one last issue. On my machine, Ubuntu Studio Karmic with Compiz and the works, is damn smooth (far smoother than Jaunty). Yet this machine was clunky as hell. The log-on sounds we’re stuttered. They still are, but they’re a lot better and I’m putting it down to low spec and filing it under I-don’t-care.

Spending some time in the terminal, I was getting error messages spat out at me left right and centre over and over again at a fierce rate of repetition. They went like this:

Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.512447] ata4.01: configured for PIO4
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.513091] ata4: EH complete
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.516020] ata4: drained 32768 bytes to clear DRQ.
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584267] ata4.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584275] ata4.01: ST_FIRST: DRQ=1 with device error, dev_stat 0x59
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584289] ata4.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 pio 36 in
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584291] cdb 12 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584293] res 59/00:01:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584298] ata4.01: status: { DRDY DRQ ERR }
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584332] ata4: soft resetting link

Daunting, eh?

The logs kept growing, and I couldn’t open the Log File Viewer because it couldn’t take it (as expected). I begged for help on the forums but because the query was so hardware specific and such a generic error the cry was in vein.

Now I don’t know much of what those errors mean at all. A bit of Google’ing led me to stories of duff hard-drives, but I wasn’t buying any of that! I fiddled around with the insides and fixed it by un-plugging the CD/DVD-ROM drive. So it must’ve been a dodgy cable or unit. But again, I don’t care why, it works. Yay

There, Perfect!

It’s sweet. From all that error checking, I’ve beaten the first level of lagno (GNOME game, Reversi clone) which I’m very happy about. Even Rhythmbox doesn’t jerk (haven’t tried it in the garage properly yet – far too cold ). I love it, and my brother can now study his A-levels, play on Wesnoth and browse with Chrome.

Also, I hate to admit it, but it’s not bad looking. The brown kind of glows, the fonts are bubbly. It makes me smile when I use it. (I feel like I should be telling this to a shrink!) I’ve got no proper gripes and it’s helping me use my PC in the greatest ways possible.

I haven’t got down to any major road testing with Ubuntu Studio Karmic yet, mainly because it’s so damn cold in that garage. I’ve got band demos to record and websites to build. Studio Karmic will get a thrashing. But for now, I’m very happy with what I’ve got. Thank you Ubuntu

Once we got there and met the promoter things started to calm down. It was a casual event and the atmosphere was chilled – very pleasent after a busy week at work. Our nerves soon calmed down.

We didn’t know what to expect. I knew it was our fisrt gig in a while and I wouldn’t want to experiment infront of a larger crowd but because of the bar upstairs it seemed empty before we got on. We were waiting for a crowd to build but didn’t see one.

After the first song that all changed. People want to see what goes down when they hear things. It’s quite inspiring when this happens

It felt good to get on that stage again. This is the set we played:

• Friend or foe
• Confused
• Romeo
• Seven questions
• Perfect cure

It was the first time I got to use my new kit live on stage. It’s amazing beyond words. I didn’t hit all the sweet spots with the setting but I’ve got a much better idea of what to do next time and that was my aim.

We were a bit jumpy at first but soon picked up amazing pace. All I could think of afterwards was how much we’re gonna rock next time

I’ll get some photos up when I can find them.