Getting up and facing the Sun

          About four months ago, I pulled down the Shutter! On blogging, on most of new things I was involved in, and I killed a few old processes too. There wasn't much happening around for me. The world meanwhile has moved ahead. Unity has seen some noticeable improvements, gnome 3 is also getting better, both of them picking good ideas from each other, Ubuntu is trying to break into tablet space, Linux Mint not wanting to disappoint many fans of classic desktop has chosen MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions ) to lead the way for them and they are also working on Mate - A fork of Classic Gnome (gnome 2.32). Meanwhile there are other people who have switched to XFCE/ LXDE etc.

           Lots and lots happening around with Fedora and OpenSUSE both releasing major versions that look and feel promising. I have downloaded Fedora 16 but I'm yet waiting to get a spare USB to put it on my Laptop. The Live Desktop does look promising but in the end it's the things that are after an install that matter. Follows my current state of affairs!


            I have switched back to Win XP on my Laptop. Windows 7 became boring after about Six Months of use. And funnily enough I upgraded my Laptop's RAM from 1GB to 3GB right after that. But one advantage of the extra RAM is I can have Eclipse and Netbeans both running Simultaneously and I can start a Virtual Machine without worrying about my machine slowing down.
For a fortnight I dabbled in Android and after lots of headache managed to get all components working. I even got to "Hello World!" but that's kind of on back burner right now.
 
             Besides I have gotten hold of Ubuntu 11.10 the latest and with latest updates and stuff I think I'll give Unity a Spin. Though Unity feels slow when compared to Live Gnome 3. There's always a delay with everything. It doesn't feel snappy. I don't know if it's because my machine has an integrated Intel 4500MHD graphics chip. But Gnome 3 did feel snappy. I will investigate in this. Though I'm kind of irritated right now. I wanted to play some songs and then queue some right from nautilus but there is no way to do it. Again there might be some extension for this but right now I miss WinAmp too much. In fact, WinAmp with Jammix Enhancer Plugin is one of the few reasons I stick to windows to listen to music.

               Anyways right today I was working on a shell script to get some info out of text files and put them into a webpage. I got the page right but then the Higher Powers that be wanted it in an excelsheet, so I tried to import it in Office. It seemed to do it fine until I reached the end of the file. After 7634 row no, all the records were put into a single cell. I don't know what the problem is. I rebooted my machine and went to XP (There too! :D). I imported the webpage and surely I can see 10032 records. I save it to Excel 2003 format and open it in Ubuntu, and funnily enough the Excelsheet opened fine. Irritating, but such things should get better.

            Anyway, my impression of unity thus far is that it has scope, provided it gets faster. Canonical has done a good job on it. What they need to do is stick with a set of Applications and try and integrate the experience. Because there are people like me who keep their music organized and don't need Music Libraries (and don't use them). Oh and losing Banshee to Volume Indicator is just plainly bad, since there's no way to get to it using keyboard. You need to open it using Mouse - or touchpad in my case. Alright I can use Fn Keys for Playback and next/prev, but I can't open the window.

            Another thing that I have recently tried and gotten hooked to is XBMC. The interface is truly great. It's not perfect, but it's fun to use. And you completely get out of Windows(I am using it on Windows, plan to get it on Linux too). My eMachines Laptop recently completed 1 Year and the way it's run I think I can keep it for another couple of years and not miss anything, especially considering my workload and type.

            Where I go on from here? Tough question. For now though I got truckload of movies and Anime Serials thanks to my friends who are as passionate as me when it comes to Movies, Masti and Magic. So let's have fun! Life is too short anyway! Cheerio!