Dapper Ramblings

I've been using Dapper Drake for a couple of weeks now, and she's actually doing OK for an operating system that's still in development.

Here's some thoughts that have crossed my mind in the past few weeks:

• Woohoo! The eject button on my DVD-Rom works now! Wait a second - it only works on ONE of my drives... doh!
• XGL hotness is... uhh... hot. The beerorkid.com repositories host packages of the latest development version of XGL and Compiz (instructions). It's a treat to get a Compiz update every week. (There's always new features... sometimes stuff breaks, but very good progress is being made)
• Gnumeric does many different types of regressions now! (ie. it can do other fancy fits to data points other than line of best fit.... Yes, it takes a special type of person to appreciate this.) ;)
• There's a lot more menu entries (ie. ".desktop" files) for applications you can install via synpatic or the slick "Add/Remove [Applications]" app. Some of the menu entries have smarter labels now too. (QJackctl was renamed to just "Jack Control"... much more effective.)
• I actually can't live without Deskbar anymore. (hmm, maybe that deserves its own post?)
• I can't live without Tremulous anymore either.
• If you like playing with any of your network settings by hand via the terminal, NetworkManager is your worst enemy. First off, my nm-applet (the little graphical interface to NetworkManager) doesn't work at all for me. It just doesn't appear. Secondly, NetworkManager does some funky stuff if you try to connect to a wireless network by hand with "iwconfig". I'll connect to a network, and then after about a minute NetworkManager will silently do something to kill my wifi connection (it just looks like the link quality dies)... Moral of the story: Make sure you kill "nm-applet" and "NetworkManagerDispatcher", otherwise you'll have some headaches. (... and if you don't use nm-applet at all like me, just uninstall NetworkManager.)

No screenshots you say? Well, to be honest, Dapper looks pretty much like Breezy... There's some fancy notifications here and there, but nothing spectacular. I've been pretty busy over the past two weeks, but I'll try to post some screenshots if I can scrounge up enough time. :)