Occasional Thoughts

Dear David Fincher, Director of The Social Network,

yesterday evening I saw your great movie and I must say that I enjoyed it very much.

Besides the very interesting plot I was very happy that you have chosen KDE as Desktop environment for Marks computer (that does not prove that Mark is using KDE in real-life, of course - but as Mark is a smart guy, I would not wonder). At least you haven't followed the rest of Hollywood and gave him an Apple or made him use Windows.

I was very delighted that you did your homework and showed us the magic of wget and perl and no unrealistic Hollywood typical computer voodoo. People that did not know how to fetch a bunch of images from a website really learned something. Thank you very much for that.

But... really... was it necessary to ruin this good impression with the close up of the terminal session, where Mark had typed

> ping localhost
PING localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.031 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=0.036 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_req=5 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
^C
--- localhost.localdomain ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3996ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.031/0.040/0.047/0.005 ms

I guess Mark knows that his computer is up and running, while he sits in front of it surfing Facebook.

KDE 4.4 comes with a great native editor for your blog: Blogilo. Out of the box it supports Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType and Google GData. So Serendipity users may feel left out. However you can use Blogilo with Serendipity anyway since there is the XML-RPC plugin available. You just need to know how to configure it.

I already wrote about my experiences with Jaunty Jackalope on a HP EliteBook 8530w. Now this article is a delta update for Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10).

All in all hardware support is much better now. I did not had to install updated NVidia drivers (and still have no problems at all - even the random artifacts after waking up are gone) nor an updated firmware for WLAN. Even the function keys are partially working.

My mother wanted a simple laptop, which is sufficient for browsing the web, writing some emails and some letters. So I haven chosen a HP Compaq 615 since it has a very low price but does it's job. As I don't want to bother my mother with viruses and I wanted the flexibility to setup a system that just fits her needs, I installed Kubuntu. Therefore the next advantage of the HP Compaq 615 is that it has no Microsoft Tax - it's delivered with DR-DOS only.

Ubuntu is supported very well on this laptop. After some tweaks, I managed to get everything working but some function keys that are not really required.

Some days ago I got my new notebook that replaced my previous HP Compaq 8240: An HP EliteBook 8530w. Of course the first thing I did was to shrink the Windows Vista partition to make room for a fresh Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope installation (32  Bit).

Out of the box hardware support is pretty good - I just had some minor problems that I have sorted out in the meantime.