Nathan’s Blog

Ubuntu 8.04 was released at the end of April. For past releases I have usually upgrade during the beta cycle at least a month before release, but I’m in no rush to upgrade this time as 7.10 has served me well.

I started off the process last night by upgrading my old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5100. I really only use this laptop when something else is busted and so was able to do a fresh installation to see what the new process is like.

The actual installer is a fully graphical mouse-driven 7 step process; choose your language, choose your timezone, choose your keyboard type, select a username and password, etc. Having made my choices I left the installer run overnight.

Sound works fine, 3D acceleration is OK (based on glxinfo | grep direct). Unfortunately my PCMCIA wireless NIC is still not supported OOTB. I noticed immediately before X started there was a log entry on the text console:

May 7 16:56:39 nathan-laptop kernel: [ 528.426318] b43legacy-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the correct firmware (version 3).

Indeed, following those instructions will result in a working system. As Ubuntu gets better I cant help holding it to a higher standard, and I think we can certainly do better here:

• This message only appears for 2 seconds; there’s no chance to fully process what it says. At a minimum, the GUI needs to be smart enough to provide these kind of issues in a tooltip after you login.
• It seems like the kind of thing that could be easily automated; if I’m just pasting a bunch of commands into a terminal it cant be too hard to provide a simple GUI wrapper to do the whole thing for me.

The msttcorefonts package is a good example of the latter; it respects the license of the 3rd-party fonts while still providing an automated way to install them.

Of course I’ve glossed over how to actually get access to the internet when your network card is not working – using the ethernet port is the usual answer.

With that solved, I just had to get connected to my WAP. NetworkManager is becoming a very polished piece of software in this regard and seems to fall into the “just works” category.

Next I tried out Gnome’s Windows file-share browsing functionality, which I’ve found a bit flakey in the past. This time it could see all my Windows PCs immediately and I was able to quickly locate a .mkv file on another computer.

Final thing I’ve checked out was actually playing the .mkv with Ubuntu’s default video player (Totem). It did not have a codec to play the file and so popped up a “Do you want to search for a codec?” dialog like you see on Windows. That Windows dialog is infamous I think for never doing anything useful, but that wasn’t the case for Ubuntu. It offered a list of codecs I might wish to install (I chose them all), downloaded and then started the video.

I guess you could argue it could be even simpler (why not just offer to download all codecs when the video player started) but the experience compared to Windows is certainly much better.

There’s been some discussion online about Steve’s review of Mario Kart Wii, particularly the final score allocated. Scores are often a point of contention nowadays, and I think part of the issue is simply that AusGamers is trying to rate games with 5/10 as an average title, instead of the 7 to 8 that is now par for the industry.

Having playing online for a while now though, I would say my personal rating would tend towards the 9/10 mark. The AI may cheat too much in 150cc (I dont know, I haven’t tried single-player 150cc yet) but for someone who loved previous iterations of the game, the online mode is near perfect.

The only real criticisms I have is functionality that I guess was never going to be there: stuff like voice communication with opponents and ability to customize the items/rules. Even without those additions this game continues to draw me in at the expense of GTAIV. Given the heapings of praise that game is receiving, that has to say something about the quality of Mario Kart Wii.