customising life

There are many criticisms of closed source or proprietary software.  I just want to whine about one in particular; the inability to fix bugs in the program.

Recently someone ‘upgraded’ a fairly well known piece of office software (no not that one) and in the process broke another program that was working in between said program and a custom DB system I had made.

Needless to say I was right pissed, only being told after the event; with no time to assess the upgrade, check that the new version would be compatible or to make sure it was done correctly.

The upgrade being done incorrectly left pieces of an old ODBC driver lying about the Windows registry (shudder), which took a long time to scour and clean up. It took me just as long to find the cause and solution to the problem as it did to fix it, due to poor documentation.

Anyway, finally, even after getting this driver working again, the second program, which runs between the two DB systems was still broken because it was not patched for this upgrade.

Their tech support tells me they are working on a patch, which won’t be ready until the end of the week. In the meantime, I am ferrying data between the two systems manually, and am ever so slightly, going crazy.

The final straw and the case for my argument was that the purpose of this so called ‘patch’ is to fix the part of the program that checks the version of the aforementioned DB program. If I could have modified the code, all I’d need to do is change it so it would allow the latest version. Apparently it would have been as easy as modifying a ‘10′ to an ‘11′.

Ai! Where’s my wine?

The conditions had to be just right.

I tried out Kubuntu in my first days of using GNU/Linux, and absolutely hated it. I thought it was too much, too tacky with the cutsy looking icons, boucning cursor and every application began with a K. GNOME was a much s simpler step for me coming from Windows. This seemed to go against popular ‘opinion’ or at least as I percieved it; that KDE is more like Windows (aysiu has some nice dissections on this topic and many others).

Anyway, it’s almost 2 years since I first used Kubuntu; I’m ready for a second go.

I’ve been going great running Edgy at home, I skipped Feisty due to freezing issues, but now feel like I’m left behind in terms of leading edge developments. Simply stated I’m talking Compiz-Fusion. But I’ll get to that another day.

I’ve been very impressed with several KDE applications I’ve picked up along the way; KTorrent, Yakuake and KDiff3 come to mind.

I’ve also just finished an extensive project at work (for now), which required daily usage of .NET. Now I’m done with that I’m really keen to liberate this machine and turn my other box running Xubuntu into a local network server (for our project files, Bugzilla, Plone and other goodies).

So the conditions were just right to try out Gutsy Tribe 5.

The installation was simple and smooth as I’ve come to expect from installing Ubuntu . The issue had installing Feisty with Ubiquity and partitions didn’t re-appear, although it may have been because I was starting from a fresh partition.

My initial impression of Kubuntu this time, that it is very comprehensive. From applications to settings and the ability to customise, I could see there was many things I could play around with.

The first was installing the NVIDIA drivers so I could get Kubuntu across both of my monitors. The restricted drivers manager handles this easily, and setting up the second monitor in the NVIDIA settings dialog was simple.

The result….

And with a little time and effort (and GNU/Linux experience) I quickly changed those things that irked me most; opening files with a single-click, bouncing cursor and the original theme (it just makes me think of candy that is way tooo sweet!). I think this could be the start of something great.