W3C video from Hollywood!

The W3C has been working on a promotional video aimed to explain what the consortium does. The video is aimed to people not familiar with W3C world and web technologies, and is a done putting together opinion of people from different areas and companies. It was taken during the 3rd W3C Web & TV Workshop in Hollywood.

Take a look and you may find someone you know in the video

Trying out Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Oncelot

This week I’ve done the upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10. I usually wait few weeks before doing the upgrade, to make sure the first post release bugs have been fixed, but this time I had few annoying bugs in 11.04 I was hoping to get rid of, so I did the upgrade right away.

I’m not going to make a review, but only give some impressions and also talk about one bug I managed to fix in case someone else has the same problem

Look and feel

Want to see the new Ubuntu look and feel directly from your Browser? Take a look here

http://www.ubuntu.com/tour/

Is basically the same as 11.04 but improved. I must say the first time I used Unity I was a bit “shocked” but after a while I’ve started to like it. I think usability is improved. I also have to admit they have copied a lot from Mac OS (but this has been a constant for Ubuntu in the last years).

Stability

One of the reason I upgraded was to get rid of one main annoying bug: the X server (I presume) freezing once in a while. So far I haven’t experienced any freeze, but is probably to early to talk.

Issues

The first issue I had was after restarting the system. It didn’t accept my password. I suspected it was using the wrong keyboard layout and in fact I manage to login using the onscreen keyboard functionality available from the login menu. The fact was that the keyboard settings after login were perfectly fine.

After some struggling I managed to fix the issue changing the default keyboard setting in /etc/default/keyboard file, that now looks like this for me (I have an italian keyboard)


XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="it"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS=""


I have some other open issues I didn’t have time to look into:

1. the side bar (or whatever is called) tend to get stuck (i.e. do not show up if you move the mouse on the side). But you can always use the windows key on the keyboard.
2. The wireless sometimes doesn’t work properly on start-up; what happens is that I can connect to my wireless router but then I cannot even ping it. Enabling/Disabling the wireless (I use the hw switch of my laptop) solves the problem. I must say this was a problem also in 11.04 and there was happening at every start-up. In 11.10 it happens only sporadically, so is actually an improvement This seems to work all the time now
3. RabbitVCS doesn’t seem to work anymore with the new version of nautilus. But this is probably RabittVCS fault (kind of)
4. Suspension now works but hibernation still doesn’t work. I’ve tried several proposed workaround but they didn’t help. In /var/log/pm-suspend.logI can see an error message related to NetworkManager:
   
   /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/49bluetooth suspend suspend: success.
   Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55NetworkManager suspend suspend:
   Having NetworkManager put all interaces to sleep...Failed.

   /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/55NetworkManager suspend suspend: success.
Running hook /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/60_wpa_supplicant suspend suspend:
Failed to connect to wpa_supplicant - wpa_ctrl_open: No such file or directory


   I need to play around with it and see if disabling before suspend could help, as soon as I get some time.

Conclusions

So far so good. I’m pretty satisfied that the upgrade didn’t blow up my PC But is to early to judge,let’s test this new system a but and see how it works

The Joy of stats

Hans Rosling is a Swedish professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden). I love his way of talking about data and statistics,it’s really fascinating.

Take a look at this documentary from BBC called “The Joy of Stats” or if you don’t have time for the full documentary, you could start from this short extract

“It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?”