bu.rri.to

In the last article, I wrote about some of my experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I’ve continued to use it over the last couple of days and so I thought I’d post a follow-up article with some more notes that I’ve compiled about this latest Ubuntu release.

By the way…

I want to make clear that not everything has been roses so far. There seems to be a crash/hang that I’ve triggered twice now (once while trying to plug in an external USB hard drive, and once while trying to set up a network printer) where the entire GUI hangs. I can move the mouse around but I can’t click on anything, and the standard X.org tricks of pressing ctrl-alt-F1 to drop to a terminal or ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X don’t work. However, both times that this hang has occurred I was able to ssh into the machine from another computer and tell the computer to reboot from the command line (”sudo reboot now”). I haven’t been able to reproduce these hangs thus far.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 vs. 3.0

OpenOffice.org 3.0

Ubuntu 8.10 ships by default with OpenOffice.org 2.4. Recently, version 3.0 was released. I wish they had shipped with this version, but it’s not hard to upgrade. I followed the process outlined at Softpedia and upgraded to 3.0 without a hitch.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 seems to be a great release; I’ve thrown all sorts of Microsoft Office documents at it and it’s been able to open and edit them without any issues. Creating documents from scratch in the OOo native file formats is easy as well. Anyone familiar with Microsoft Office should feel right at home here.

Gnome Do

In addition to Linux, I use Mac OS X and Windows for work and play from time to time. One of my favorite apps on the Mac is Quicksilver. It’s essentially a program launcher that’s operated entirely with your keyboard and makes it incredibly easy to launch any app installed on your system. After I got used to Quicksilver on the Mac, it was a pain when using Windows to have to go to Start -> Programs -> CompanyName -> AppName to launch a program. Luckily there’s Launchy, which is a clone of Quicksilver for Windows.

The default Ubuntu software repositories have a similar app, Gnome Do, which seems to perform all of the functions that I use from Quicksilver and Launchy flawlessly. You simply press a hotkey to bring it up, start typing the name of the program you want to open, and press enter when it’s displayed. You really have to try it to get the hang of how it works — it’s changed the way I use computers.

Gnome Do also comes with a bunch of plugins which add additional functionality. For example, there’s a “Tweet” action which will post whatever you type to Twitter, and there’s a Delicious plugin that’ll index all of your Delicious bookmarks and let you search them.

Smooth Fonts

Font Appearance Prefs

I absolutely love the way fonts look using subpixel smoothing in Ubuntu 8.10. To enable subpixel rendering, go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance and click the Fonts tab. The difference between the default “Best Shapes” rendering and subpixel smoothing is like night and day to my eyes. Some people don’t like lots of font antialiasing and therefore would probably prefer the default setting, but I highly recommend at least trying subpixel smoothing to see if it looks better to you.

Incidentally, as you can see in the screenshot to the left, I use a font called Inconsolata as my fixed width font. It’s a great font for programming and console use and is available for free at Raph Levien’s website.

More to come…

As of right now I’m running Intrepid full time on my main desktop computer, so I’m sure I’ll have more notes to post in the near future. Thanks for reading and check back soon for more!