Ubuntu 9.10 Beta Karmic

I have just installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 beta on my EEEPC 100H and so far it’s been a great experience. Things that work better out of the box

• Synaptic touch pad
• LCD Fonts
• Remix user interface
• Network printing
• Performance
• Suspend/Resume
• Bluetooth device setup
• I also have reason to believe that the sound works better in Skype, but I’m still kicking the tyres on that

Improved Applications:

• GNOME Evolution now works well on the smaller screen
• Gwibber is much more useful for microblogging but it needs some work on reliability and performance
• Eclipse 3.5 now installs out of the box
• BOUML is now up to date

A few odd things that it would be nice to see fixed

• Evolution sometimes looses it Window border. Something to do with the Remix window manager I think
• Some things I had to try a second time before they settled down. E.g. 3G network management, bluetooth mouse setup (but that was probably finger trouble on my part), Skype sound

All in all a great release. I love it!

(20/Oct/09 — added comment about Gwibber reliability)

How I would change netbook hardware

I’ve been using my ASUS EEPC 1000H for 10 months now and there are some obvious changes that could improve the form factor which no one seems to be implementing. So here is my $200 worth

• Remove the speakers — it’s hard to get decent sound anyway. I’m mobile so I don’t want disturb others and I always use headphones. Use the space for something else
• Use a trackpoint instead of a trackpad. Takes up a lot less space and is harder to accidentally hit when typing
• Try and make the screen a little taller so that it can display 1024×768. There are just enough applications that don’t work at 1024×600 to make this important
• Improve video playback — the form factor makes a great mini-TV but sometimes… Would this be a simple matter of improving the graphics card?
• Ship with 2Gb already!
• Oh .. and don’t bother with fingerprint scanners, there are more important things.

I’m happy enough with my EEEPC that it’s my main computer (but I have a big screen and keyboard to use with it, and I don’t use tools like Eclipse)

Git and Openoffice.org

N.B. These are very rough notes. See also

Sometime ago I shouted my mouth off at a local Perl Mongers meeting that using custom merge drivers it would be possible to auto merge OpenOffice document from Git, which seemed to interest some people greatly at the time.

However I then backtracked because I failed to take a few things into  account. After some more investigation it turns out it should be possible (with some wrapper scripts and OpenOffice programming) and I  *believe* the following approach stands a chance of working (I’m  hedging my bets here)

1) Create a wrapper script that opens a document, switches on change recording and saves the document, called say changeRecordingOn

2) Create another wrapper script that takes two documents (a and b), runs the OpenOffice Edit->Changes->Merge Document function and saves the result as c, called say ooAutomerge(a,b,c) (NB Base revision is  useless)

3) Create and associate a git custom merge tool for .odt and .ods files that runs ooAutomerge(). Might also need a custom merge driver?

4) Create a pre-commit hook that runs changeRecordingOn for all .odt and .ods files

When running a git-merge and then git-mergetool the OpenOffice GUI should be presented with a list of changes to accept/reject, which is much easier

NB It seems that running the OO merge and saving file c removes the previous change history. This means that if the file is merged again then the user only sees the new history since the last merge (which is what we want)

I doubt I will need this feature for some time so I don’t intend to  take it further at the moment — however if you have a need, these  notes might be useful..

I hope this makes sense? Apologies if I just swallowed two minutes of your day that could have been spend doing something better.