I recently purchased one of the Acer Aspire notebooks. It's small enough that I don't feel like Sisyphus dragging a rock up the mountain, but large enough to actually be useful. I got it home, wiped Windows, and set about installing Ubuntu 10.04 on it.
I like 10.04. It's still got the Gnome 2 environment, which I find to be a great balance between usability and attractiveness, and I've absolutely no need to upgrade. However, the Aspire uses a newer Atheros AR9485 wireless card, and it's not supported under the 2.6.32 kernel.
Crap. That means upgrading to 3.0. That means upgrading to Ubuntu 11 and losing Gnome 2 for the mess that is Unity. Do let's start gnashing teeth and listening to Elliot Smith records now.
I did scads of research, and there is simply no way to get Gnome 2 working under Ubuntu 11. There's a fallback configuration for Gnome 3 that looks a bit similar, but it's not the same. The panel is stubbornly resistant to customization, and GTK2 themes don't work. That's irksome, because the Clearlooks engine was one of the cleanest and most attractive interface setups since Motif.
Then I came across references to Mint Linux. Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, but the developers appear to hate the whole Gnome 3 atrocity as much as I do. The difference is that they actually went and did something about it.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Revisionism
It's already begun. Mitt Romney showed up at the NRA convention Friday and gave a keynote address that boiled down to "Obama's going to take your guns, but I'm the guy who's going to fight for you right to keep them!"
Nice try, Mitt, but some of us have long memories. We remember who supported the original Assault Weapons Ban in 1993, and we haven't forgotten who signed off on a permanent extension of Massachusetts' state-level equivalent in 2004. Signing up for an NRA life membership two years later doesn't erase that.
Frankly, I don't expect the guy to push for the 2nd Amendment if he gets elected. I don't think we can even expect a wizened little shove. The best we'll get is that he stays out of the way of the progress we're making.
Is the situation ideal? Nope. But politics isn't about the ideal; it's about what's practical and achievable. This is something you just can't beat into the Ron Paul zealots. We take the best candidate who has a chance of winning, and this time around, it's Mitt Romney.
If he doesn't screw up too badly, we've got another few years with a sympathetic legislature and Supreme Court, and that's where the gains are to be made.
In happier news, check this out:
9mm Hornady Critical Defense loadings against pork ribs. Tell me it's no good now, Captain Tactical! While not the least bit scientific, I'm going to claim that this completely contradicts those silly Swiss goat shooting tests and declare that the .45 is just for old coots with compensation issues.
Nice try, Mitt, but some of us have long memories. We remember who supported the original Assault Weapons Ban in 1993, and we haven't forgotten who signed off on a permanent extension of Massachusetts' state-level equivalent in 2004. Signing up for an NRA life membership two years later doesn't erase that.
Frankly, I don't expect the guy to push for the 2nd Amendment if he gets elected. I don't think we can even expect a wizened little shove. The best we'll get is that he stays out of the way of the progress we're making.
Is the situation ideal? Nope. But politics isn't about the ideal; it's about what's practical and achievable. This is something you just can't beat into the Ron Paul zealots. We take the best candidate who has a chance of winning, and this time around, it's Mitt Romney.
If he doesn't screw up too badly, we've got another few years with a sympathetic legislature and Supreme Court, and that's where the gains are to be made.
In happier news, check this out:
9mm Hornady Critical Defense loadings against pork ribs. Tell me it's no good now, Captain Tactical! While not the least bit scientific, I'm going to claim that this completely contradicts those silly Swiss goat shooting tests and declare that the .45 is just for old coots with compensation issues.
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