popey.com

Following on from Clint, Christer, and Valent who all detail the first things they do post install on a Linux system.. Here's mine:-

• Enable Medibuntu repository (see their site for details)

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

• Get the good (*) stuff

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras vlc mplayer w32codecs miro hpodder skype recordmydesktop ardour audacity ffmpeg ssh gnome-do wine dosbox dosemu spectemu-x11

Mostly media stuff like DVD playback, codecs, fonts, Flash and Java get installed with ubuntu-restricted-extras. VLC and MPlayer for when Totem doesn't cut it. Miro and hpodder for downloading my video and audio podcasts. Evil skype for talking to evil friends. Some screencasting and audio & video manipulation tools. SSH for remote access and gnome-do for fast application access.

Finally some fun can be had with wine and various emulators.

• The "optional" (**) stuff

After all that has finished, I might go and get Zattoo for a bit of TV watching, Gitso for providing support, Gwibber for keeping up to date with Twitter and identi.ca, Google Gears for offline Google Docs and finally VirtualBox for running legacy operating systems.

* For some 'good' read 'bad'.
** I always install this lot so it's hardly optional, but it's a little more manual.

I learn from Cali Lewis via her twitter feed that Adobe are talking about developing a version of Flash for the iPhone.

Paul Betlem, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems confirmed that Adobe is working on Flash for iPhone. He was speaking at the Flash On the Beach Conference and said, “My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.”

Am I the only person to find it deeply ironic that Adobe should complain that the iPhone is a closed platform when their own web platform 'Flash' is closed, and they have no intention of opening it up.

Welcome to our world of pain Adobe.

Just picked it up today, and so far I'm very happy with it. It'll make my commute to/from work a lot easier and faster.

Seeing "I might go back to Slackware if this bug isn't fixed.".

Crikey! Quick lads, refocus all bug-squashing resources on this one, we're about to lose a user to Slackware!

Whilst I appreciate bugs can be irritating, making idle threats, demands or other pressure really doesn't help at all. Basing your entire OS choice on one bug - however annoying it may be - might also be a somewhat flawed perspective. Just a thought.

Edit: For clarity, I'll explain it's not me that's leaving Ubuntu for Slackware, that was what was said on an Ubuntu bug report by someone else.

The recent Microsoft TV advertisments reminded me of an incident which happened to me in a pub recently.

I went to the pub to meet up with some friends for a drink after work. The wife of one of my friends was also there. She and her friend came over to sit with us outside. I happened to be wearing a Firefox polo shirt which was noticed by my friends wife - she works for Mircosoft.

Friends wife: "Is that Firefox? Where have I heard of that?"
Me: (not wanting a conversation about geek stuff in the pub) "It's a product which competes with one of Microsofts products."
Friends wife: "Nah, we don't have any competitors."
Me: "..."
Friends wife: "Except maybe Google.

I didn't say anything else.

Is that really the perception of people in Microsoft, that they have no competition from anyone? Isn't that a touch arrogant?

If it's true, why the TV ad campaign, why the Mojave experiment? Surely if they have no competition then they have nothing to worry about. Maybe they just know that they have (in Vista) a crap product that people don't want, which requires significant ($300M) investment to bolster public perception.