Hardly a Heron

Upgraded Marduk to the latest Ubuntu release while marathoning Indiana Jones today. I know, I know, it’s been out for weeks and I’m just now updating. I slapped it onto my Cuckoo drive and got stalled there. Buying a house and moving makes it hard to find time for playing with your computer’s psyche.

Anywho, I initially did it from the update manager and, for the first time since I switched to Ubuntu, did not break my system in the process. (Yay for actually partitioning to leave enough space for root!) I didn’t, however, like the way it updated. The config file I’d hacked to get my sound working was overwritten by the new file, which broke my sound, my panel at the bottom was wonky, a tiny bug in the boot cycle that had never been bad enough for me to sit down and fix it was much, much worse, etc. etc. So just now I popped in one of the CD’s I made for updating Clarity’s machine and re-did the update.

Much, much nicer. The icky stuff going on with the new firefox is still there, obviously, but most of the little annoying stuff that crept in for the first update went away. My sound is working without the hack and the bug in the boot cycle didn’t present during the first boot. (Might creep in later, we’ll see) I’ll give the new stuff in firefox a few days to grow on me before stripping it out.

On a related note, we took the wireless router over to the Indiana Jones Marathon so people could be spared having to pay attention to Temple of Doom. Rather than try to add everybody’s Mac address and give away our treasured network key etc. we stripped all the security off of it. After finishing the CD update just now I was re-downloading the package for my ATI graphics driver – I adore me some special Vista-killing effects – and noticed that it was going painfully slowly. So I logged into the router, gave it a decent encryption key again (1234567890 just isn’t as secure as it used to be), put the MAC filtering on again and told it to stop announcing its presence to all and sundry.

My downloads are working very nicely again. Muahah. Silly neighbors, the wacko newbs with the dead grass and mud in the front yard are not giving you a free ride to the internet.