However, at some point it started diverging. First beta and nightly versions started asking for phone state and identity permissions. This was removed at some point, soon to be replaced with read sensitive log permission. Now, as awesome as the new tablet interface and hardware accelerated UI is, it wants to read and write to the default browser history. That’s the same place as many malware apps go to harvest personal data.

Keep browser private. Keep browsing history, bookmarks, cookies and everything else private. Just because the OS allows to share browsing history with other apps doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. Stay on the right path, Firefox.

So, it was a rather unusual move for me to give a serious try to competition. Unsurprisingly, I picked the infamous Ubuntu for my new Asus X101. Incidentally, this is a very nice piece of netbook hardware for under $200; and I had only been semi-annoyed with MeeGo until I found out it lacked any serious package repositories I had come to expect. So, maybe thinking simplicity, and reading a lot about Ubuntu, Unity, and GNOME 3, I thought to myself – why not? I could handle the change.

In short, it was an easy and somewhat pleasant start. But it did come to a disappointing finish.

Installation

I started with the live USB bootable image that I downloaded from Ubuntu’s website and installed via UNetbootin. This worked great and in a couple of easy clicks I had a bootable USB stick with live Ubuntu system on it that I could boot to verify all hardware worked. This passed with flying colors – after booting I had a working wifi, USB, SD card reader, sound card; and I was even able to download the Google talk Firefox plugin and verify webcam was working.

At that point I decided to reboot and install the OS. This, again, went very smoothly. The installation process was simple and straightforward; even too much so at some points. I guess I am used to sane and simple defaults but also coupled with detailed advanced configuration options with openSUSE, but I’m not complaining, not yet anyway. The download of additional packages during installation, noticeably the language packs, took longer than I expected, but again, I’m not complaining – the process itself was painless.

Setup and first boot

Sometimes the line between the setup and the first boot is blurred, as the new system components can be loaded as they are being installed. The process had me set up a user with a password, Internet connection settings and few other things. Ubuntu users know that root user has no password for security purposes but you can easily sudo or run anything as root via other ways.

After a reboot I was asked to enter my Internet connection settings again, which is OK because it also had me set up an encrypted password storage at the same time for my user. It’s worth mentioning that as long as your login password and password storage encryption password are the same, it will be automatically decrypted and “open” once you log in – this was a really convenient feature.

I also tested that general functionalities such as hibernate, suspend and resume worked quite nicely. I was also pleasantly surprised that I was getting a longer battery life under Ubuntu than I did under MeeGo. Under normal use, my battery lasted about 4 hours – which is the advertised battery life of this netbook – which is an amazing feat!

Environment and applications

For an active KDE user the Unity interface is different, to say the least. First, it’s simple. Second, it’s really simple. Third, it’s missing configuration options. Fourth it’s still simple; maybe a little too much so. But, at the same time, when you have a netbook and your screen real estate is limited, simplicity may be a “good thing”. For example, many applications start full screen by default, and compiz (which is enabled by default) provides a nice multi-desktop task management interface. Also, some common sense information is populated on the top bar and some functions and shortcuts are easily accessible from there. It’s also worth noting that pressing the “home” button on my netbook brought up a launch screen with search box that made it easy to launch programs that are not otherwise easily accessible.

I found Ubuntu’s “app store” like interface a breath of fresh air at first as I could search for pretty much anything in an app store and install it with ease. I ended up installing geany because I found gedit inadequate for scripting purposes. I also installed the whole LAMP stack without any issues. I also used apt command-line tool to install some packages and found it easy to use.

Where it started going south

First, some minor things started creeping up that really were minor annoyances but many that do add up during day to day use. Here are some:

• Gnome and/or Gtk components are not as consistent as their Qt and KDE counterparts. Some like to auto-select things, some copy contents to clipboard while others do not, some allow tabs to be selected components, tab scrolling is not efficient or standardized, etc.
• When I select text, it isn’t automatically put in my clipboard. I am not a big fan of ctrl+c and ctrl+v combinations (that’s 4 extra keypesses!) when I could just click once instead.
• I don’t like blurry fonts. I usually change all my UI fonts to Adobe Helvetica type 1 bitmap and similar courier counterpart for fixed width. These fonts are easily located or come installed by default on openSUSE. I couldn’t find a single non-blurry pretty font on Ubuntu; and I couldn’t easily locate them in the app store either.
• Application menu bar is usually situated in the top bar (similar to Mac), but not always. Some applications follow their own rules and this creates confusion.
• Due to the above, there is no way to change window focus using mouse from a non-maximized window to a maximized one without having to click into the contents of the maximized window; this just requires an additional thought sub-process where none should be needed
• Scroll bars, or lack thereof – I don’t even want to fully get started – have half-baked magically appearing scroll buttons that sometimes appear on the left side, on the right side, or via different inconsistent mouse movements, don’t provide adequate UI and annoy user (i.e. me) consistently.
• I cannot configure many things, in applications or the system, that I was used to configuring in KDE in openSUSE to look or act exactly to my preferences. It’s true that sane defaults make sense, but UI should also provide a way to tweak some settings to fit users’ tastes.
• No firewall exists by default, the system is wide open. By contrast, openSUSE firewall is turned on by default with all ports blocked unless you, the user, tell it to open the ones you need for specific services.
• Several other minor things turned up but I would rather not list all here.

Where it failed

I could overcome the minor inconveniences. But then this turned into a complete failure after a few updates.

• Battery life decreased with single update to MeeGo levels. I don’t know whether this was related the reported Linux kernel 3.0 regression or there was another underlying cause but the change went in the wrong direction
• Wifi connection no longer asks the encrypted password storage for passwords; in fact, it no longer seems to be aware of that functionality. This is a major inconvenience as (1) my wifi passwords are not something I do or can memorize, (2) something I bother to type in every time the netbook comes out of suspend or hibernate state, (3) forces me to manually launch the password storage application, open the password, copy it, close those windows and paste it in the wifi password dialog. I haven’t found what caused this change; and found no solutions online. I tried reinstalling “seahorse” (what?) with no luck.
• Home button no longer consistently brings up the home launch screen. In fact, sometimes I have a problem bringing up that screen; the behavior is not consistent.
• Sometimes the small windows/dialogs are hidden behind a main window and there is no way to switch to them – not by unmaximizing main window, not by minimizing main window, not by pressing alt-tab; the only way to recover is to close the offending application, start it again, and hope it works this time; this is rare but annoying, especially when you really can’t afford above steps, and the behavior is not consistently reproducible.
• I lost even more options in system preferences. In fact the only options there now are the ones I really do not care about. One positive note with one of these updates – I was able to disable anti-aliasing and have a semi-decent non-blurry fonts in the UI.
• Ubuntu app store search does not return relevant results unless you know exactly what you are looking for; and even then, package names may have nothing to do with their functionality. Also results are sorted alphabetically and many searches return 100s of them which can’t be easily navigated (remember scroll bars?). Also the search is “instant” and returns results as you type which is slightly annoying. Combine that with its generally slow performance on netbook and at the end of it all it becomes near unusable.
• At a later point Ubuntu app store completely disappeared from the menu and the apps list. But at this point I’m not going to put any time in figuring out what happened and trying to remedy this.

So I’m pretty much set at this point to go switch away, very likely back to openSUSE, as I cannot handle any more disappointments like these. Too bad, as Ubuntu had some promise, and, frankly still does.

• check SIP port in sip.conf (default should be 5060)
• check/adjust RTP ports in rtp.conf to your preferred range and take note
• open both above ports/range in firewall and forward to your Asterisk IP address
• in sip.conf global section set localnet to your local network
• if you have a static external IP address set externip to it in sip.conf (hint: you can also set public port there, if different)
• if you have a dynamic IP address set externhost to your host name and externrefresh to how often asterisk should resolve that host name in seconds, still in sip.conf
• still in sip.conf set qualify=yes and nat=yes for accounts that are behind NAT

Other pointers: check your firewall and turn on/off some WAN settings that may interfere with SIP. Check for any firewalls on the host itself. Good luck!

After the game Sloan had a long conversation with the Jazz general manager Kevin O’Connor, delaying his post-game press conference. Apparently, forward Andrei Kirilenko was also present in the meeting. Sloan mostly didn’t address that discussion that night. But it looks like it didn’t go his way either. Next morning’s practice was abruptly canceled. He was being pushed by Deron, and, all of a sudden, he no longer had the front office and ownership support to rely on, as he did in prior years. That’s when he finally decided to call it quits. So did the assistant coach Phil Johnson.

After communicating the decision to the ownership the owner Greg Miller personally pleaded to the coaches himself to stay. So did Kevin O’Connor. Coaches said they’d sleep on the decision, which they did. Nothing changed the next morning, and Jerry Sloan and Phil Johnson held a news conference announcing their retirement.

All the talk of no longer having the desire and energy from Jerry Sloan is typical of his handling of the situation. Most likely, he didn’t want to create more drama and controversy around players. In fact, when getting compliments or awards, he had always deferred to saying it was players’ game and not coaches’, the players should get the compliments instead.

Most of all, keep in mind that he resigned two days after signing the contract extension to coach next year.

CNN: We bring you both sides of every story.

MSNBC: Opinions are like assholes. When shit happens, they are the only things that matter.

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There is a way to install more than one, they can coexist on the same system, and even run concurrently next to each other, and it’s not hard.

Let’s assume you already have your stable version installed through your package manager and you are trying to add the nightly to your system. The versions don’t really matter, the concept is the same:

1. Download the nightly binary from the latest trunk builds (make sure you get the right binary for your platform – 32-bit or 64-bit)
2. Unzip to your favorite location – I usually create ~/Applications so its path ends up being ~/Applications/firefox
3. In your ~/bin directory create a new text file called firefox-minefield and put the following contents in it
   #!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/yourname/Applications/firefox
cd /home/yourname/Applications/firefox
./firefox -no-remote -P Minefield
4. Obviously, replace yourname with your user’s home directory, save the file and make it executable
5. Create a new Firefox profile by typing “firefox -ProfileManager” (without quotes) in the command line and press enter; you should see the profile manager window; just create a new profile called Minefield
6. Before you leave that screen, select the original profile again (usually called Default) and start Firefox; then close Firefox
7. Now, still from the command line, type firefox-minefield and press enter, you should see the Firefox nightly version

To run both stable and nightly together, close the nightly first, start the stable, then start the nightly like above. Feel free to create a new menu entry or a desktop shortcut to the firefox-minefield script to start without the command line.

Just to provide some explanation, the above steps create a separate directory for a new Firefox version, create a separate script to start it with a separate profile and separate process, then create that profile. It also needs to load libraries from its own directory first, hence the LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting. Hope it helps!

One day, my KDevelop crashes while editing a PHP file. I am bummed. I try the same exact edit again – crash! I am bugged by the KDE crash handler every time it crashes asking me to report the crash. So I think to myself – why not – let me do it for once!

So I click “next” and follow each step – not a lot more than clicking next each step of the way. It tells me that my bug report is 2 out of 3 stars, if I want to make it even better I should install the “debug” packages and there is a button to do it for me.

So, willing to just let it take me for the ride, I press that button. It opens up YaST package manager, asks me for password, and installs several debug packages automatically; then it shows I have 3 out of 3 stars. Cool – I think to myself! Click next, it asks me to log in or create an account on bugs.kde.org. I hesitate, but I think to myself – why not – I’ve come this far, what’s one more step. So I click on the link, create an account, confirm e-mail address, then log in with my new credentials back in my KDE crash handler window.

Now it analyzes my crash and searches existing bugs for similar reports. It comes up with 3 results that are PHP related bugs by looking at the titles, they are not really the same. So, I do not choose any one of those and pick to create a new bug. It finally displays all information it is about to send to KDE bugs website and asks me to confirm. I look to check if there’s any private info, or even semi-private info – there was none – so I go ahead and finish the process at which point I am able to access my own shiny new bug report on KDE bugs.

Oh well, I think to myself, if this is anything like the dreadful Windows “send error report” to Microsoft message this bug report will never get looked at. Best case scenario – someone will comment on it or change the bug status to something else within the next few months. Oh well, at least I tried.

I guess I am shocked that mere 3 hours later, one of the maintainers of the KDevelop package, Milian Wolff, commits a code patch to fix the crash! What?!!! That’s just a joke right? But no, it’s not April 1st, it must be something else. What did just happen? I thought nobody cares about users anymore, especially the open source developers, right? Well, think again, then.

From now on, I’ll make a good use of the Factory packages and the excellent bug/crash reporting tool KDE provides. And so should you!