More on the Ubuntu Upgrade

I haven't posted on this since my original post here

Mostly everything works well, but there have been a couple of niggly things that I needed to fix.

One of these is syncing with my PDA/ mobile phone. I really like the fact that I can keep appointments, contacts etc. on both my phone and desktop and synchronise them from time to time. Of course you would expect that there would be problems communicating across the Great Divide from the Free World (linux) to the Empire (Windows- including Windows Mobile). But the Open Source community has come to the fore and made it possible to do this through a bunch of applications called generally SynCE and open-sync.

My problem is that whenever I upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu (every 6 months on average) I usually have to play around with the sync stuff because it doesn't work straight away. The problem is usually that old settings are retained and not quite upgraded correctly. This time I had to delete the partnership (that is the connection between the desktop and the PDA), and then delete the synchronisation groups- for some reason one of these had been duplicated meaning that it was trying to re-duplicate all my contacts etc then ran into more problems trying to compare everything. So once I started everything with a clean slate it worked fine, except for the annoying problem of adjusting times on my computer for recurring appointments to negatively allow for daylight savings.

Anyway details of synce are here and the Ubuntu specific directions are here.

My other complaint with Ubuntu is that it only installs the gnome screensaver. Although this is based on xscreensaver, it doesn't offer the same amount of configurability. For example if you choose a "Random" screensaver in gnome-screensaver you have to take all of the screensavers, whereas with xscreensaver you can choose out of a very long list which ones you want to show. You can also set up xscreensaver to use "fortune" to generate the text for text-type screensavers- I have generated a huge database of bible verses in a fortune file which I like to have come up on the screen rather than the bland "Linux- date- time" texts. If you want to replace gnome-screensaver with xscreensaver then follow the steps listed here

Well that's my geek knowledge thoroughly exhausted! At the moment I'm happy with just aobut every aspect of my computer system. I still have to install 9.10 on my Eee netbook but that can wait. I also have to upgrade Margaret's computer but I'll do that some time when she isn't looking. :)