2007-04-09 01:34
by Vasil Kolev(no, today is not the first of April, this one is serious)
Something got me – the girlfriend is with her parents, I finished re-reading Schvejk, and after the last update my work environment was slow – so I reinstalled the laptop with Ubuntu.
Some words for the Ubuntu itself – I had to hack the installer to work as I needed it (it felt the weird need to reformat the partition that I had, otherwise it refused to install – some grep, strace and editing of python code – turned out that it didn’t recognize ReiserFS), after which it just put a system on the drive and worked. Then there was the normal fight with Xgl and compiz, but in the end it started working normally (there are just a few small bugs remaining). I had also to change the system locale from bg_BG.UTF-8 to bg_BG.CP1251 so I could work with my normal terminal (UTF-8 is AFAIK supported by only gnome-terminal, Konsole and xterm, which are damn slow).
I compiled for myself just trannset-df and gaim (because I can’t stand 2.0, and 1.5 is missing in edgy), made the network setup the same as in Debian, and now everything works. I needed to configure from scratch only evolution. Turned out that in edgy they haven’t broken mrxvt as in Debian.
Definitely the AIGLX that’s in X now is far worse than the Xgl implementation as for speed (although I have the dirty thought that part of the problem in in the schedulers). There’s no flickering while changing workspaces, which helps a lot not to feel like killing your desktop machine :)
I’m going to probably stop using my machine as a guinea pig for whatever comes into my mind, at most I’ll make a chroot with debian unstable for some experiments.