10 Jun 2006
A new version of Ubuntu (codename 'Dapper Drake') has been available for a little while, so I thought that it was about time to update Emperor to the latest and greatest. Unfortunately, I hadn't kept on top of releases, so I was a couple of stable versions behind---The Emperor was sporting 'Hoary Hedgehog', but had missed out on 'Breezy Badger'. I tried following the instructions for upgrading from an older version, but managed to mess something up somehow. Since I didn't have any important files on the laptop which weren't also backed up somewhere else, I decided to cut my losses and do and a clean install of Ubuntu 6.06.
Now, The Emperor is getting on a bit, and compiling from source is glacial. So it took most of the evening to get Ubuntu installed and running. It was well worth it though---the distribution is slicker than ever. However, the default Gnome desktop is a bit heavy going for my poor old laptop, so I decided to have a go at installing the cutting edge Enlightenment 1.7, otherwise known as E17 (not to be confused with the boy band). It was quite a task because there aren't any packages for Debian or Ubuntu yet, but I eventually got it going. I'm a big fan of Enlightenment: it looks gorgeous, and yet is surprisingly light on resource usage. E17 has some lovely visual effects, including animated desktop backgrounds, which sound like a nightmare, but are actually extremely attractive and not distracting. Better still, E17 is much more snappy on my machine than Gnome Desktop. My next task is to get Ruby, Rails and Subversion back on again so that I can do Tracks development on it.