SM has bought a new laptop and I spent the morning playing around with it. It came pre-installed with Mandrake 9.1 - and my mission was to get kernel 2.6, Ximian OpenOffice.org 1.1 and GNOME 2.6 up and running on that. GNOME 2.6 and OOo wasn’t much of a problem - kernel 2.6 seems to have some issues. It takes ages to get past that “Loading 2.6.6 …..” message, and also, SM’s external USB mouse won’t work with it (I don’t have much experience with USB devices - so maybe I am being simply stupid here). There are also some issues with the firewire controller - but I don’t think that will be needed at this stage.

The horrors of setting up CUPS from scratch

ESR was right. Today, I had the misfortune of having to setup CUPS+Gimp-print+foomatic+ghostscript (from scratch) in my system. Chewing through verbose logfiles (around 10 MB in size) can be really painful. Anyway, in the end it turned out to be a permissions related issue, and I managed to get the thing up and running with my Canon BJC 2100SP printer.

Sun JDS Eval Live CD

Managed to get my hands on a Jun Java Desktop System evaluation Live CD. The basic structure of the CD is quite similar to Ankur Bangla Live CD - which isn’t surprising - since both use the same Morphix base for the initial bootstrapping. Once that is over - our livecd boots into a Mandrake derivative - while their’s boots into a SuSE derivative. Initially the desktop looks slick - but there are quite a few issues with the Live CD. For example, during bootup - the Morphix base complains about missing directories (deb, exec and a few others). This can be easily avoided - we faced the same issues during our development process, and we just added a few extra empty directories. This is quite a minor issue - since most people won’t be seeing these error messages as they are reported behind the bootsplash screen. However - once you are within the desktop - there are a few quite serious issues which Sun should have definitely addressed before going out with a public release. For example , there are two menu items called “New login” and “New login in a nested window”. When someone clicks them - a GDM login screen is supposed to appear - either in another instance of X - or in a Xnest window (the only condition being that GDM must be running from beforehands). But in the JDS livecd - none of these menu items work - simply because in a Morphix derivative CD - GDM is not normally run - GNOME is started from by running gnome-session via .xinitrc. Again - something is seriously borked with floppy mounting - when I tried to mount the floppy - I got the message “The /floppy symlink points to nowhere”. Now how on earth did they come up with that ? Frankly speaking, I am quite dissappointed - I really expected something better from Sun. Hopefully, the actual (installable) JDS is better.

Nor’wester

Towards the evening - we had a nor’wester here. Lots of fun - with branches and window shutters (broken off) flying around - people running around. After that the power went off, that wasn’t much fun.