Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

In the interests of being balanced…

Rythmbox “just works” playing stuff off my DAAP server. It hasn’t crashed on me (yet). All the hardware in this machine (Dell XPS 1530) seems to be supported, though I haven’t tried the fingerprint scanner or the webcam. I did have to poke about a bit to get audio output going as there are two output devices and the system muted the analog output by default.

It’ll be a perfectly acceptable “work” system, so if I can iron out the display stuff from my previous post I’ll probably just keep this laptop running Ubuntu.

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Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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Couple of things I’ve yet to resolve:

• Can’t get the WineHQ version of Wine to do anything more than crash when trying to run WoW;
• Crossover Games runs WoW at a really nice framerate, not a great deal different to Vista on the same hardware. Unfortunately I can’t quite convince it to do audio if anything else at all is doing so;
• rdesktop “feels” slower than the Windows RDC client talking to the same machine via the same ssh tunnel. There’s probably something tweakable, it’s not Ubuntu-specific — this is the usual default for rdesktop;
• Haven’t yet figured out how to get the system to default to the display settings I want: ignore the builtin LCD, use the external one at 1280×1024. I can set it this way after login (fn-F8 twice, then run the nVidia settings doover and fix the resolution) but logout and it resets to the internal at 1400×900;
• Apps — Firefox in particular — don’t behave very well when there’s high I/O load. Copy 8GB of files from one part of the filesystem to another, watch Firefox turn grey;
• Firefox is really not liking Facebook. At all. It works, mostly, but gets really slow. This is not so on Windows or OS X.

I wouldn’t mind resolving at least some of these, but none of it is troublesome enough to be a major priority given that I’ve got a new iMac on the way.

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Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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