Scratches, VirtualBox and Karmic Koalas
I noticed my damn screen got scratched during Assembly, at some point. I have a five or six thin scratches right in the middle part of the top of my screen. Not deep scratches or anything, just small things that reflect in a rainbow color. Fuck! If anyone has any good tricks, i'm all ears. I've used displex to take care of similar scratches from my mobile phone screens, but they are very different, in that they have a hard plastic shell, as opposed to a soft one. I'm not sure what it'll do. Toothpaste also works.
Karmic Koala, the next release of Ubuntu, also known as 9.10, is reaching alpha 4 tomorrow on the 14th. I'm following the new release closely, as i think it looks great, what with new versions of Gnome, the kernel and for instance, new Intel graphics drivers in place of the broken borked onces that crippled Jaunty completely (doesn't work to any satisfactory degree on my thinkpad x41). One of the things the development gurus have been paying attention to is the boot-time. We're getting very close to a sub-20-second boot (The goal for Jaunty i think was 25 seconds). This is a big topic nowadays, what with MontaVista's embedded linux that claims to boot in one second in to some kind of environment. Not to mention all the laptop vendors who offer their small OS on a chip that boots as fast as a BIOS setup screen. Basically, there are times when i just need a browser to check some timetables, or some other little thing, and booting up a whole system is kind of moot. At that point you really wish you'd have a browser, maybe an IM or something ready in a few seconds without having to load all sorts of esoterics.
For my testing, i use VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems, which is in the Ubuntu repo's. It's a nice little program for running your own virtual servers. It has support for amd virtualization technology, and with it, it really doesn't place too much load on my Phenom2. I can give it a few hundred megs of ram, a dynamic disk drive, network access and whatever i want.
The only thing it doesn't do (3.0 version claims to improve this), is gaming, since the OS only sees emulated hardware (as with most virtualization techniques), so it can't access all the fancy hijinks of the GPU that sits on the host machine. There are ways to emulate stuff, but it's previously been really slow. I haven't honestly read too much in to what they've been cooking for the 3.0 release, but i'm gonna try it out when i have the time.
Right now, i'm just you know.. learning, watching and testing.
Edit: I was looking through the A3 release (while waiting for A4, actually did a dist-upgrade, which took it to kernel 2.6.31-5, but how do i see which alpha i'm on?), i noticed that Pidgin (the IM client), has been replaced by Empathy. Empathy is an IM client that uses the Telepathy framework for communication. We also have the Firefox 3.5 package *with* ubuntu branding (no more Shiretoko on there...).
