La Salle Debain

Open Source @ Consolidated Braincells Inc.

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About La Salle Debain

This is a weblog I'm keeping about my work on Debian and any other useful Debian related info I come across. It is not meant to compete with other news sources like Debian Weekly News or Debian Planet. Mostly it is just a way for me to classify and remember all the random bits of information that I have floating around me. I thought maybe by using a blog it could be of some use to others too. Btw. "I" refers to Jaldhar H. Vyas, Debian developer for over 8 years. If you want to know more about me, my home page is here.

The name? Debain is a very common misspelling of Debian and la salle de bains means bathroom in French.

If you have a comment to make on something you read here, feel free to write to me at jaldhar@debian.org.

You can get an rss 0.91 feed of the blog here.

Thursday, October 21 2004

Warty Warthog

Ubuntu Linux 4.10 was released yesterday. I installed it and have been playing around with it. The most notable thing about it from my point of view is that as it contains GNOME 2.8, it has good support for Gujarati (thanks to the Utkarsh team.)

Ubuntu Screenshot

As you can see it is not perfect. Some parts are still not translated.and if you look at FireFox, it is mangling jodaksharas pretty badly. This is an upstream problem so I don't blame Ubuntu for it.

Overall I'm impressed with Ubuntu, so much so that I'm considering "sidegrading" my laptop which runs sarge to it. Though The stumbling block is I prefer KDE to GNOME. So I will have to investigate how good KDE support is first.

Why would a Debian developer prefer a derivative over Debian itself? The current Debian release process is utterly dysfunctional and the project has too much inertia to fix it (even if there was a will to do so which there isn't.) It remains to be seen if Ubuntu can actually follow through on its promise to make timely releases but if it can, those of us who don't think of operating systems as ends in themselves will find it most welcome.


posted at: 00:00:00 | #