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OK - the CentOS glib2 update went well but I still couldn't get gtk webkit installed, other libraries I couldn't replace were just too crusty.

So I cleared a disk and installed ubuntu, and found a repo with webkit-gtk and installed a couple webkit browsers. Seems the gstreamer html5 thing is disabled, may be a developer branch or something.

Ubuntu boots really fast, but has some annoyances. But I'm sure I'll get use to them.
Even though I don't get to play with html5 media w/ gstreamer backend, I did get to play with more modern media libraries, and now have a nice shell script that eats my dv files and spits out both ogg theora and h.264.

Additionally, I found a cool flash player called flowerpower or something like that (OK - it's flowplayer, but flowerpower sounds better) that solves a big problem.

Now instead of using cortado (java player) as a fallback for non html5 media browsers I can use flash player w/ h.264. I still need to do a little tweaking of my code but it works, and is much nicer than the java player.

No - I chmod 666 all the daemons to give them more power, lest they be cast out

I'm running 9.0.4.
Desktop edition.

I really like the fact that apt tracks packages installed as dependencies so they can be auto-magically removed, that's nice.

I hate the default theme though. What, do they think we all work for UPS?

Last edited by resedit (2009-09-05 12:07 pm)

jerwin wrote:

No - I chmod 666 all the daemons to give them more power, lest they be cast out

Exploiting your machine must be a joy.

Hey, wait a minute! That means that they can't do a damn thing.

Yeah you are right.
Instead what I did was chmod 666 everything else so the daemons could have free reign to do whatever they want.

I'm seriously thinking about switching to Ubuntu full time.
The only hitch is the servers I admin all run CentOS - some with a customized php that I maintain - so I need to have local access to CentOS both for compiling and testing / troubleshooting.

But Ubuntu seems to have a lot of the advantages of Fedora (fresher packages) without many of the rough edges that tend not to get solved in Fedora until they are just about ready to release a new version.

I don't like the way debian packages are built, I really think rpm is superior - and I have to find a good equivalent to mock for building packages - but so far, I've not had to build crap myself. There's PPA repos that have fresh modern versions of whatever I need that isn't in main (multimedia stuff and the webkit based browsers I'm playing with).

My only major complaint is that when I asked it to install flash, it wanted to download the i386 version along with all the crap and bloat needed to run i386 plugins in x86_64. Even though x86_64 flash is beta, they should either package it or point users to it rather than pull in an i386 plugin. The beta x86_64 plugin works fantastically for 99.99% of things.