Software development is hard: regardless whether you are building the next generation space shuttle or a funky free bingo game. Miscommunication and opposing visions may lead to out-of-control spending and incapable products. As long as there are multiple individuals involved, this kind of situation is bound to happen.

This is partly due to the fact that the geeky developers and MBA executives live in parallel universes and speak incompatible dialects. The lost in translation contributed by project managers is transformed, magnified and twisted during the design, develop and deploy stages. This poses quite a challenge for the organization as a whole. See the below pictures for an example:

Here is the big picture.

Two weeks ago, I subscribed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS from here, and got it last weekend. The package includes 3 liveCD: for PC, for 64-bit PC and for Mac. Here is the review from “Apprentice” Gentoo user.

Booting
It really takes a little while from boot option to the GNOME desktop showes up, 2m 45s. It is tollerable considering the GNOME is a full-fledged desktop environment.

First impression
Although I am not a big fan of GNOME, I must admit, the default theme rocks. The English font is crispy; the Chinese font in the file browser also looks nice, while in the console, it is as ugly as it appears in my Gentoo’s rxvt-unicode. I am not so picky about the font by all means.

Hardware support
The kernel is relative new ( ubuntu 2.6.15-23-386 ), and the hardware probe really does a good job.

• CPU is recoganized, and speedstep is enabled by powernowd
• Chipset works
• Video adapter works flawlessly in 1024×768@60Hz, Direct rendering is enabled via Mesa DRI R200 20041207 AGP 1x TCL. I bet Ubuntu uses the OSS ATI driver, come on, this is Debian-based distribution.
• Sound Card ALSA works
• Ethernet is supposed to work out of box, not tested.
• Wireless I have no idea whether Dell TruMobile 1345 is supported by the native driver. I always use ndiswrapper. The liveCD loads the bcm43xx module, but fails to update the firmware. Ironically, the ndiswrapper module is also built for use, but the ndiswrapper application itself s missing. Not working, period.
• Harddisk DMA support is enabled, the performance is as good as Gentoo.

Software support
This distribution is based upon GNOME 2.14.1, the file browser supports auto mount and file preview. The package management looks like synaptic.

This distribution is targeted to small bussiness, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Evolution, and Ekiga ( succeeder of GNOMEMeeting ) are bundled for the office productivities. There also Gaim, Gimp and a few desktop games.

It also take the multimedia into account, but I am quite disappointed to Rhythmbox and Totem. The iTune-like Rhythmbox is too complicated for me; I just want to play music, I would take care of the organization of library by myself, but I have to import music to Rhythmbox before I play them, after several failures, I lost my interest. And Totem can not handle my DivX-encoded AVI file, complains that the plugin is missing. Ok, just forget them.

The non-English input is supported by SCIM, but no input methods are installed in the default
configuration, so why bother put SCIM there?

From the developer’s aspective, we have Perl-5.8.7, Python-2.4.3, but some essential components are missing: gcc, gmake, gvim, emacs, flex, bison, autotools, latex…

Summary
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS liveCD still rocks as the playground for the newbies, and it also a descent rescure liveCD with all kinds of FS support, various utilities. But it is still lacks some features I am looking for:

• Full ndiswrapper support
• cisco-vpn
• SCIM with scim-pinyin
• Media player( mplayer/xine/whatever) with evil win32-codecs
• Developement toolchain

An eBay seller introduces her scratched Creative Zen Micro:

Seriously, it’s a bit scratched because we never put a protective skin on it. I guess that’s why we have six kids.

I think this is the best conclusion to describe all these computer murder in 2006. Just after the funeral of Dell 700m, the eMachine T2482 also declared its death this morning.

Like the laptop, there is no signal on the monitor suddenly. And I could not boot this machine afterwards. Usually this is caused by the dust, so I clean the house carefully, unfortunately this seems not working this time.

I happened to push the CPU fan, and the computer booted, but one minute later, the screen became black as before. It looked like that I need to push the CPU tightly all the time to have the system run.

Currently, I am working on the Pentium-III machine. The playground may go offline these days. :-(

There is a hot debat on slashdot about KDE vs. Gnome, ” Torvalds Says ‘Use KDE”. Thousands of Gnome users are arguing that Gnome is more elegant or relatively close to Mac OSX than KDE.

Gnome application may lacks the functionality than KDE

Hey, that is the problem, KDE application is easy to integrate the imporvement from the core by using KPart.

But it runs fast than KDE

You bet, but it is true that KDE has a larger footprint.

QT/KDE are bloated, slow

Again, I am reeeeeeeally tired of this stupid conclusion. With KDE split-ebuilds, this neat feature would be enabled in KDE 4, you just install what you want instead of the meta packages.

Here is an imcomplete list for the flamers, choose your favorite and start the engine:

• Vim vs. Emacs
• Gnome vs. KDE
• FreeBSD vs. Linux
• Reiser/Reiser4 vs. Ext3