Holizz versus the Web

Where do I buy the olives without the milky milk? THEY ALL CONTAIN LACTOSE!

Oh my god. I tried Damn Small Linux today. It has NO FONTS! It didn’t render a single character of Japanese. I was so not impressed.

DSL gets a holizz-rating of ♇ (that symbol means Pluto) - keep it up and you might be a real planet distro one day.

I just posted a personal looking for friends/penpals. It wasn’t particularly taxing to write, but it was good fun. I’ll post it here too:

ブラッドフォード大学校でコンピューター・サイエンスの勉強をしています。

ブラッドフォード・カレジで日本語の勉強をしています。そして、日本人と日本語の勉強してと英語の教えています。一年ぐらい勉強をしました。今年１２月に日本語能力試験の三級をします。

大学校のアニメとカルト・テレビ社会のプレジデントです。アーチェリーや柔術をします。そして毎週母さんと泳ぎます。

もと人見知りですから人々に会いたいです。日本人も日本語の勉強する人も。

英語で：

I’m studying Computer Science at Bradford University.

I’m studying Japanese at Bradford College. I’m also studying Japanese and teaching English with/to a Japanese person. I’ve been studying for about a year. This December I’m going to take the 3rd level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

I’m the president of the university’s Anime & Cult TV Society. I practice Archery and Juujutsu. I also go swimming every week with my mum.

I’m a former shy person, so I want to meet lots of people. Japanese people, and people studying Japanese.

Turns out I was a week behind schedule for, well… everything.

I discovered earlier today that the Sports and Societies Fair is this coming Thursday, not the Thursday after next.

Just this minute I discovered that I’d agreed to help out the union this week (they still want help next week, but I’d agreed to help this week).

So as it turns out, I could have been doing things all week. I missed the archery social on Thursday too because it slipped my mind.

But I have something to do tomorrow, so that makes me happy. And then Sunday I have two things to do: swimming in the morning and helping people move in to halls (assuming I don’t forget that too). In theory I should be able to make myself useful to the union at other times in the week (assuming I am able to find out how to do this without excessive effort on my part).

I did part of a practice test for the 日本語能力試験(JLPT) ３級 and gave up when my lack of understanding got to me. As it turns out I came fairly close to the pass mark. So it might be possible to do ３級 this year. I have until the end of the month so I have more study time before I make the decision of ３級 or ４級.

ふー

SCIM doesn’t work with Qt at all. It is not very good. But fear not, for Tom knows how to fix this glaring bug in Qt!

Step one: install scim-qtimm. I downloaded the Ubuntu package of scim-qtimm (for my Debian installation).

Step two: start or restart any Qt apps, and stare in amazement at your ability to use your IME!

I’m glad I got it sorted out. Now I can search for よつばと♪ or あゆみ in Amarok (pretty much the only Qt app I use regularly). It sucks, however, that the package isn’t in Debian.

See also: Computing in Japanese.

At long last Firefox supports sessions! No more M-e n (Alt+e, n) Use current pages at the end of a session. Nope! I tried this feature twice, and then any subsequent attempt (including on a fresh .mozilla) failed.

It also has a new theme, and the Go! button is attached to the addressbar (and doesn’t say Go anymore).

There’s also a nice List all tabs button on the right of the tabbar.

It seems like Firefox really does want to be competative after all (rather than just being the best FOSS browser).

Oh… all of the buttons have become grey. Haha!

Finally, I got Ubuntu installed.

I have no idea what the problem was, but I tried it again tonight, and now it’s installed. I’m going to have to install Edgy Eft though, because I’m intrigued about upstart.

And now I’m going to bed. Good night, Internet.

I installed OpenBSD last night. Not a first, but it’s the first time I actually spent effort trying to learn how to get things working.

It seems OpenBSD is quite lacking in the UTF-8 department, and also in the translations department. It’s list of locales (/etc/locales/ or something like that) didn’t have most locales in UTF-8 (i.e. there was an en_US.UTF-8 but no en_GB.UTF-8 or ja_JP.UTF-8). And when I mounted my media drive it didn’t display the names (yes, many of my files and directories contain non-US-ASCII characters) correctly in most places (although some GUI tools got it right, mlterm looked like it was using some other encoding).

I did, however, like it very much. I like the way everything is switched off until you switch it on (unlike Debian, which adds things to /etc/rc?.d willy-nilly).

It also comes with things a lot of base distributions are missing, like ssh (which Debian doesn’t come with for some reason) and lynx. If I’ve just installed a distribution for the first time and I don’t have a Web browser how am I expected to find the documentation which tells me how to install a package for a Web browser? I also like the way it comes with Apache in the base install (and how it can be turned on by editing one line). It’s not a lot of binary, and it means if the machine’s to be a Web server (a very common use case for an OS like OpenBSD) it doesn’t require much setting-up.

As a desktop (what I want, at least on this machine at the moment), it didn’t fare too well, as I like a system which can be up fairly functional in an hour or so with the latest version of certain applications (since things like Gajim, ROX-Filer, and Xfce weren’t too good not so long ago - and I don’t like compiling my own stuff - although Gentoo is fine, because it grabs dependancies).

As a server I think it would be fairly good to work with, although I expect the UTF-8 problem might be problematic (at least to me - I use no other encoding and tend to ditch software that can’t be set to use UTF-8 by default). I’m sure to any experienced user there’s a simple solution, but I couldn’t find anything with a quick Google search.

OpenBSD = +++. If I’d managed to get UTF-8 to work, it might have been rated as +++++++ or even FTW. I’ll research it though.

Desktop Linux survey launches.

1. Which Linux distros do you use on your home or office desktop system(s)?

Debian - at home

Red Hat - at uni. (ick)

2. Which windowing environments do you frequently use on your Linux desktop(s)?

XFce - it is XFTW

3. Which web browsers do you frequently use on your Linux desktop(s)?

Firefox - teh super-suck

4. Which email clients do you frequently use on your Linux desktop(s)?

Does not apply - GMail

5. Which of these methods do you use to run Windows apps on your Linux desktop(s)?

None — I don’t run Windows apps on Linux - well yeah…

Of the many Ubuntu releases I have tried, none have been any good.

It doesn’t look at your harddrives and run swapon for swap partitions. In fact, I tried running swapon /dev/hda2 and it gave me some error message in Japanese (because I was using the Japanese localisation). But I’m sure it said something along the lines of Ubuntu is only for popular bloggers with machines purchased in the past two years, how dare you attempt to allow your old machine to run it at a sensible speed?!.

On top of that, its GTK2 buttons always look like they’re being broadcast on Channel 5 until you mouseover them. It’s the only distribution that I’ve ever witnessed doing that.

I may have installed Ubuntu once with one of the old installer-seperate-from-the-live-CD, but I haven’t managed to install Ubuntu (or Xubuntu) from one of the live-and-installer CDs. It always fails with some cryptic error message (or in the latest case, it crashes - presumably from lack of RAM which would be fixed with swapon - before I can finish installing).

I’ve decided that Ubuntu must only like really recent PCs and the bloggers that write their blogs on them (which is why all the bloggers love Ubuntu).

Having said all that, I keep downloading and burning Ubuntu hoping that I’ll be able to install it and actually try it.