Ubuntu Hoary LiveCD Experience

I tried Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary HedgeHog) Preview LiveCD on my T42 last week. First experience with a LiveCD. I was in for in surprise.. Please read on..

Looking at the new features and apps coming with it, I was anxiously waiting to get the new Ubuntu release, strangely named Hoary Hedgehog. I already have a system running Warty, which am very pleased about. It is so easy to get new apps for it and there are lots of howtos available if you want to try out a new one. I was very not brave enough to dist-upgrade it to a probably unstable hoary. Then I came across the concept of LiveCD which will run the new release without touching my harddisk.. WOW.. This is the one for me..

I downloaded the LiveCD iso and burnt it. Booted my T42 Laptop with it. This was my first experience with a LiveCD, so did not know how it was going to behave. The initial stages of the bootup was simillar to an installation CD. Was very tempted to stop the procedure lest I downloaded the wrong CD. But, after asking the keyboard layout stuff etc., it detected the various devices and proceeded to start X.

It started a gnome session without any problems. Now my T42 was running linux kernel 2.6.10 with Gnome 2.10 instead of M$ W2K, that too without touching my harddisk.. wow, isn't that great ? I want to know how it is really done. Mapping /dev/hda to memory ?? :-).. I should read on that. Coming back the main topic, the various apps it included was Firefox 1.0, Thunderbird 1.0, OpenOffice 1.1.3 etc. The openoffice suite was not the latest (1.1.4 was out in dec ). But with OpenOffice 2.0 release around corner, it is not a major problem. I am sure Hoary will be updated when Sun confirms its stability.

The major disappointments were the absence of Tomboy and Beagle. The two new kids on the block powered by Mono, Novell's implementation of .Net. I am using Tomboy in my Warty machine to manage my notes. It was not in the liveCD. Could get it from the universe tree and install it, but could not manage it to run. Absence of beagle was a real disappointment. I was not able to run beagle in my current machine even after spending countless hours of recompiling the kernel, tweaking inotify etc.. So I was really waiting for a stock version of it which just ran at the click of button. sad.. :-( it was not there. Hope, they will include it in the final release.. (But I heard they have frozen the feature list long ago. )

But, on the whole, the entire liveCD experience was nice. The concept of it itself, charms me. It is really wonderful idea to safely experiment with a new release or a new distribution. Hope others are listening.

Hey, one more thing.. I am posting this from my LiveSession.. :-)

This is my friend :-)... A mini football..I am very pleased to introduced him to you

How to say "Linux"

Is it Linux where `i` is pronunced as in "pit" or Linux where `i` is pronounced as in "sign" ? The argument goes on.. People swear by what they use. But which is the correct one. As the name of this widely used OS is derived from its author's name, lets here from him what he has to say on this..Here is the sound file that used to come with the "sndconfig" utility.. It says Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!. Here are the files. WAV MP3. I think this settles the argument, but people are just incorrigible. :-)

Cox on Linus

It it an interesting read.. Alan Cox lets out his opinion about Linus Torvalds. "Linus is a good developer, but is a terrible engineer" :-)

Bond car is really possible ?

This article describes technologies to make objects invisible. So Brosnan's Aston Martin Vanquish in "Die Another Day" can really become invisible !!!

I have made my Enzo invisible, but forgot to make it visible :-)