Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
I am composing and posting this entry under Ubuntu 7.04, a.k.a. "Feisty Fawn", which has just been made available today. As with one of the 6.x releases I tried before it (but if memory serves, unlike with Ubuntu 5.10), Ubuntu 7.04 offers only three display resolutions by default—640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768—so everything looks both stretched and squashed (with a 4:3 aspect-ratio image stretched to 16:10) and blurry on my 1680 x 1050 Apple Cinema Display. Yuck. It is left to me, if I want this supposedly user-friendly GNU/Linux distribution to have a tolerable appearance with this very common model of display, to track down arcane technical details about my display then manually edit a text file. A text file that I may not have any way save, by the way, since I am running a so-called "live CD" version of Ubuntu (the same Ubuntu CDs that can be used to install Ubuntu to hard drives can also be used to run Ubuntu directly from CD without installing it). A text file, manually, in two-thousand-fucking-seven. Bah.
Upon attempting to enable desktop effects via System > Preferences > Desktop Effects, I was prompted to enable a graphics driver and upon accepting this recommendation, the application set about downloading and installing said video driver (downloading is a bit more than enabling, but I appreciate the convenience), after which I was informed that I would need to restart my computer then run the desktop effects program again. That would be fine except that I am running Ubuntu 7.04 from a CD-RW and Ubuntu did not update itself on that CD-RW, so restarting my computer will do me no good.
While the video driver was loading, I plugged in a USB stick flash-memory drive and was pleasantly surprised that it was recognized and automatically mounted for me. That pleasure quickly turned to perplexity when I noticed that the same device had been mounted twice, as both "disk" and "disk-1". Upon unmounting these in the "Places" column of one of the File Browser (Nautilus 2.18.1) windows that had opened, "disk" was replaced by "AXIS STORAGE (1)" and "disk-1" was replaced by "AXIS STORAGE (2)" with both available for remounting as though they were separate devices or separate partitions.
I did not recall partitioning this particular device and the amount of free space listed for each instance of it indicated that I had not. Creating a file on one instance that did not appear for the other even when reloading the File Browser window added to the mystery for brief seconds, but unmounting then remounting both instances again revealed the same contents for each, confirming that they were indeed two representations of the same device. Odd.
And on the subject of odd USB behavior, Ubuntu 7.04 did not seem to recognize my new USB keyboard—a Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000—from its boot menu. That seems especially odd since USB keyboards in general are now very common and since this particular one works fine once GNOME is up and running (obviously, I am typing with it right now), including the special calculator, e-mail, and media keys.
Ubuntu may be user-friendly by GNU/Linux standards, but it is still far behind Mac OS X and Windows Vista, which can both at least recognize a 1680 x 1050 Apple Cinema Display and a USB keyboard. That said, if that driver-download business actually works with a normal installation of Ubuntu 7.04 (again, I am running this from a so-called live CD at the moment), it would be a great leap beyond my last text-based experience attempting to install a video driver on GNU/Linux.
Of course, there is also the issue of visual appearance. GNOME looks much better than it used to, but even the blurring that results from stretching the 1024 x 768 (4:3) image to 1680 x 1050 (16:10) is not enough to hide the jagged pseudo-rounded window corners while even the presence of glassy title bars and many buttons that are rounded much more cleanly than the afore-mentioned window corners are not enough to keep Ubuntu (or any other operating system or distribution running GNOME) from looking like an old version of Windows—especially when running the default Web browser, Firefox, which stubbornly maintains its ugly, old-style plain rectangular buttons. Oh well; at least the jagged orange interface looks better to me than the old brown one did. Aside from being stretched and squashed, that is.
