Switching (to Ubuntu) dramas
My recent switch to Ubuntu for desktop use, hasn’t gone on without drama.
SeaMonkey
This doesn’t exist in Feisty Fawn. Apparently, it was around before, and is most likely guaranteed to be in Gutsy Gibbon, but if you’re a Feisty Fawn user, you’re bent out of luck.
My journey started with asking the nice folk at #ubuntu for help. They suggested that maybe #ubuntu-motu would have the answer. Those nice folk passed me on to #ubuntu-mozilla. But nobody really knows an answer. There is a Mozilla Team, and I do certainly hope they start rocking harder, failing which, Canonical might need to hire someone to be their “Mozilla (Wo)Man”.
Transmission
For Debian to claim they’ve got more software in the universe than anything else, I found it funny that Transmission (a nice little GUI application that handles BitTorrent) was available in Fedora but not in Ubuntu! Here you want to reference bug #104654.
BadAlloc errors when playing videos
Seems this is an upstream Xorg bug, but I never encountered this while Fedora was running on the same machine. How my brand new spanking machine can have insufficient resources to play a DVD just stinks. Logging out of X (that means closing all my applications) and relogging back in, makes things work again. Refer to bug #49360.
Spelling issues
It would only make sense that spelling packs for OpenOffice.org are installed by default. I selected Australian, but manually had to install myspell-en-au and openoffice.org-en-thesaurus-au. If it wasn’t installed, you’d not see red squiggly lines at the bottom of mis-spelled words.
Firefox in a chroot?
This is probably the only way to get working Flash content. The Ubuntu packages for gnash and swfdec are incompatible with modern Flash (and in fact, the packages seem dated) so the non-free plugin is required. For this, 32-bit Firefox in a chroot is a must. You’ll notice that spelling stops working, which is mighty annoying – fix this by installing aspell aspell-en dictionaries-common gnome-spell ispell libaspell15 libenchant1c2a libgtkspell0 myspell-en-au myspell-en-gb spell within the chroot.
MOTU vs. Package Maintainer
This is more a policy/practice niggle, rather than software related. I honestly think its important to have a package maintainer per package. Sure, a package maintainer can have many packages. But under no circumstance should a package be included, by the Masters of the Universe (MOTU), if there isn’t someone responsible for said package. This will avoid problems down the line. I think the Fedora Project got it right, in this aspect.
It actually makes me wonder, why linux doesn’t implement some kind of “universal” format similiar to apple’s… that would allow users to have 32-bit/64-bit libraries packed in one.
Actually to the flash thing the best solution I’ve found is FirefoxAMD64Flash9 in the Ubuntu community wiki. Runs flash with a wrapper and the x86 support libraries while using the standard 64bit firefox installed in ubuntu.
MOTU vs. Package Maintainer – This ‘policy’ also sets Ubuntu apart from Debian. Ubuntu’s “chaos theory”, works for the most part, in allowing developers to contribute more freely, yet one has to wonder what this does for quality assurance.