I was close to downloading an album through Ubuntu One until they requested me to register my computer. This is something I do not want to do just to buy an album, so I stopped right there and resorted to the wonderful clamz.

Anyway, during the setup I had to realize that CD-Rs have become the floppies of 2010 – not only capacity-wise but also regarding the reliability. I’ve been having this problem with Ubuntu as well as Fedora setups: When you burn the CD-R just before running the setup on another machine with a different optical drive you will often get read errors at some point in time – typically after being halfway through the setup process. This brings me to my request to the authors of Linux distribution setup procedures: If you cannot read a package from the CD please try downloading it from the Internet after asking the user whether it is OK to do so. I fixed one of the setups with a manual chroot onto the new root fs after modifying the sources.list, on another machine I simply used the mini iso which downloads eveything via the network.

Most notably, the browser feels even snappier than before and I am very pleased that connecting to my OpenVPN now also works over the UMTS/GPRS connection – with the previous version I could join the VPN via WLAN only (and even Patrick couldn’t fix it). I also noted quite a few new packages in the repositories, so there are more hours of fun ahead…

• On the machine running Karmic, vlc (the only player capable to properly play my AVCHD recordings) will drop frames like hell when running with PulseAudio.
• The Jaunty machine is a rather powerful quad-core with a high-end sound card and just listening to music with totem I will actually get occasional buffer underruns (stuttering audio) when running a kernel compile.
• On the Fedora machine I’d like to run mpd on start-up as a different user than the one logged in (who is forced to run PulseAudio) and this is not easily possible (or maybe not at all).

Even worse, it is becoming more and more painful to remove PulseAudio. You will loose ubuntu-desktop and gnome-bluetooth (also on Fedora). For Karmic I had to recompile gnome-session or else it will fully load one core trying to connect to PulseAudio. Gnome will no longer let you control the volume, neither from the panel nor via the keyboard.

So now we have shiny new features (that I never had a chance to use, because I always have to disable PulseAudio), but solid, reliable and easy sound output is history. Congratulations on breaking Linux Audio!

Google also told me that this is rather common with Dell’s Inspiron models. As a laptop without battery is rather pointless, I decided it is time to start looking for a new one – so now I am the proud owner of a Lenovo ThinkPad SL500. ThinkPads have gained the reputation of being solid business laptops over the years, however the ThinkPad fan base has decided  that the SL series is not worthy of receiving the ThinkPad brand – at least if the comments to this announcement are representative. A common theme seems to be to call the SL models ThinkBad laptops.

Now that I’ve been using my new laptop (the NRJAQGE edition with nVidia graphics and the higher LCD resolution) for a few weeks, my take on the SL500 is this: you get quite a load of laptop at a reasonable price. While I agree that it doesn’t feel as tough as for example an R61, it is still pretty solid. Some of the changes introduced with the SL series are questionable though: the glossy top is definitiley a good surface to collect hundreds of fingerprints but it fails to deliver the hip look Lenovo has probably tried to achieve.

I’m currently running Karmic on the SL500, which supports most of the hardware. What is not working at the moment is the UMTS card, the fingerprint scanner and the Lenovo buttons. There’s a patch available for the buttons and it looks like it could be included with the next kernerl update.

When I first unwrapped the CD and started listening I immediately started nodding my head and after a few minutes I caught myself thinking: Wait! Something’s wrong here. Andy Cooper is singing! What audacity! And guess what – he is doing a wonderful job. This new vocal nuance blends into the beloved UD sound just as if it had always belonged there. The choice of samples is as exceptional as always and what Einstein is doing is simply astonishing. This is definitely my favorite UD album as of yet and there’s really some tough competition out there. And even better: UD will travel all around Europe again this year, so be sure that I will be there when they come to Stuttgart next month.

And now, as an instant prove of how they are keeping the old-school alive, may I introduce to you: Ugly Ducking – I wont let it die.

Copenhagen stopover

I am currently spending three days in Helsinki for a business trip. Unfortunately I will not be leaving the airport area a lot. It is nice to visit a place where people’s keyboards have Umlauts, too. OK, instead of the German ü they have an å but the other Umlauts are the same. I have to admit that Suomi still is completely unparseable to me.

I was also surprised to notice how popular milk is in Finland. While in other parts of Europe a glass of milk is disrespected to be a drink for toddlers only, the Finns enjoy a healthy glass of milk and order it regularly with their lunch or dinner even at a restaurant. The hotel I’m staying at actually provides 6 types of milk for breakfast.

Today Helsinki saw the first bits of snow this year, so mabye I going to find out tomorrow why a large part of the cars over here are equipped with winter tires that feature metal spikes.