Ubuntu Hoary is in…

…and it rocks. Sheesh, I’ve missed KDE. Check it out for yourself. Unbelievable the amount of software that comes for free.

And, let it be known, amaroK is the music player for Linux that I’ve been waiting for for years and years and years. Playlist generation, automagic album cover downloading, automatic lyric fetching, easy CD burning right from the player, etc etc etc. And it’s even compatible with audioscrobbler, so anyone who cares will be able to discern what kind of music I listen to with up-to-the-minute detail. Wow.

It seems like every time I install a new Linux distro I say this: Linux just keeps getting better and better and better. Minor wifi hassles notwithstanding.

Ubuntu upgrade

Well, I’ve started to upgrade my laptop to the latest Ubuntu. It installed reasonably cleanly, except wireless doesn’t magically work like it did with the old version. I find it difficult to believe that Ubuntu would take a step backward in this way, where something would Just Work(tm) in a previous version, but not in a newer version.

Anyway, I’ve posted a thread on the Ubuntu support forums; hopefully I’ll get some help there, and hopefully it won’t involve recompiling kernels.

In addition, my AIM account is acting weird; like my friends list was deleted somehow. So if you chat with me on AIM, say hi so that I can add you back to my list.

laptop back

w00t! I’m writing this from my laptop, which arrived today and seems to be functioning normally. This, of course, means that I can upgrade my Ubuntu installation on my spare partition. It’ll be nice to return to KDE, or really to use KDE on the laptop for the first time!

This also means that my email is functioning normally again, email me at my usual address. Gmail is nice, but this is better.

micro$oft squirming

Microsoft is squirming over the recent Massachussetts decision to use open standard data formats. Note the argument is not specifically choosing OpenOffice over MSOffice. It’s about how the data is stored. They are choosing to use the OpenDocument format, simply because it is more free.

Microsoft is free to use this license; it is an open standard and can be implemented without restriction. That’s the whole point. Yet,

Microsoft Office does not support OpenDocument and company executives said this week they have no plans to support that format in future versions of Office.

Despite Microsoft’s refusal to support OpenDocument, Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, says

“Microsoft could put capabilities within their XML Office suite right now to open, save and manipulate OpenDocument formats. It is certainly something they could do. ”

“What we’ve backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietary standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards,” Kriss said.

Seems sensible to me. Yet Microsoft clouds the issue by claiming the XML is the main benefit of OpenDocument (XML is the language of OpenDocument, but it’s nothing more than a generic way to store data that is human-readable, like HTML):

Microsoft’s Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to “public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies.”

So two smoke screens there. The other one is about forcing a single format. This isn’t quite so, they are framing it wrong. It’s about openness, not restriction; Microsoft’s argument implies that someone will be restricted. Just not the case.

And speaking of Linux, the Kubuntu desktop is looking quite nice.

why are they surprised?

Why is everyone so surprised that the government didn’t move fast enough to help people? Since when has government been out to help people in need? It’s too preoccupied with its prime pursuits, which involve money and oil and war and vast military budgets and cutting edge technology and thought control and propaganda.

Look at the response to the tsunami last year. It was bureaucratic, slow, and profitted upon. It had nothing to do with helping people. With these people, you have to frame it in terms of dollars or it won’t make sense. And helping people is very expensive, we have to tighten our belt, we’re at war.

Can you imagine what the thousands of Louisiana National Guard troops in Iraq must be feeling? Their function is to guard the nation, and when they are desperately needed, in their own state, for their own families, to guard their actual homeland they are off protecting oil for profit?

Who is surprised?

Notes from inside New Orleans

This account was written from someone with a similar political outlook as my own:

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them – Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

Images of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on “welfare queens” and “super-predators” obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week’s events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor,overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.

The author, Jordan Flaherty, is a union organizer and journalist.

it just doesn’t stop

There are two stories that caught my eye tonight.

First, and we should all feel better about this, Halliburton has already been hired by the Navy to clean up hurricane wreckage. Glad to see the US asserting its strength.

Secondly, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu goes off on Bush:

“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.”

Bush looks remarkably like Ronald McDonald to me these days….

Ubuntu Linux

Rumor has it that my laptop will be re-delivered on tuesday. We’ll see. When it does arrive, I want to install the new version of Ubuntu, specifically so I can install Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop (normal Ubuntu defaults to GNOME).

Here are some Ubuntu links I wanted to document here, for my future reference (or indeed for anyone interested in Ubuntu:

Tux magazine

I’ve waited for something like this for years. When I first getting into Linux, the Linux magazines out were aimed more toward system administrators and programmers. I’ve said that Linux deserves a full-featured magazine aimed at end-users, and new users at that.

Enter Tux Magazine. Very cool, published by the same people who publish Linux Journal, but aimed for the new user. The magazine is published in PDF format, and distributed for free (with registration). Useful stuff here. Reading the latest issue now.