Monday, April 30, 2007

Ubuntu.... more tweaks

So... after I installed ubuntu, I had only two issues - I did not like anti-aliasing, and it was not rendering text properly for hindi website.

Basically, I was kind of pissed, but it was okay, because I was still able to do many more things compared to what I was able to do in Windows. I finally fixed Hindi rendering issue by installing complex language support and tweaked anti-aliasing settings, inside font dialogue.

Btw - Bit stream fonts are better rendered compared to default sans font and if you change anti-aliasing settings (goto fonts -> details) then you get better results compared to earlier results. Now things are much better.

So one more thing ubuntu should do is to ask - do you have LCD/TFT/CRT monitor and should adjust anti-aliasing by default.

more comfortable reading...

Friday, April 27, 2007

Finally ubuntu

1 year back, I moved to FreeBSD. I was not that hardcore programmer/user as I should be. People may argue that FreeBSD is really cool (as I said in that post) and sometimes it was really really cool. But on the other hand most of the time I had to run programs in Linux Compatibility mode, which was okay! but soon I started hitting road where, I had steep learning curve.

Which kind of forced me to get down to one thing.. think! I did not want to go vista way, I wanted windows only for prorgamming C# or Microsoft specific stuff and nothing more than that. We were already doing lots of stuff on platform independent languages, eg - ruby and java.

So basically, either I can use power of *nix without ease or get into useless world of Windows (which still earns me money). I got some what in between with ubuntu.

here are few things which worked out of box. I have dell d620

  • detected everything on my laptop
  • I copied my notes directory to Linux and ran "wine notes.exe" I got one glitch that it could not find the e:\ directory, I mappy notes directory to e:\ using winecfg
  • I connected to my VPN using vpnc instead of Cisco Secure VPN client, some how I could not get feisty fawn and Cisco Secure VPN client live together.
  • Wireless worked out of the box
  • It detects and mounts my USB drive automatically.
  • VirtualBox does virtualization for me.

Till now I am pretty happy with what I have! what all I can think of, I have it enabled.. the only thing - which I am not very sad about is - that my Hindi Font rendering does not work. So I can not read http://bbc.co.uk/hindi website properly! and I miss Dainik Jagran a lot.

Kudos to Ubuntu! Just bit more eyecandy! I do not know what I am missing, but it needs to beautiful also, although this is the most amazing experience of Linux! it just works out of box!