The ultimate guide to Cyanogenmod 10.1 : an extensive review and hands-on.

I recently wiped out my Ubuntu install on my netbook, and reinstalled it with the current beta of Fedora 19. It's a wonderfull deep dive into the desktop world of Red Hat/Fedora after 12 years of Debian & Ubuntu. And boy, is this bleeding edge : Linux 3.9, Gnome 3.8, ... The installer worked as a charm, and everything on my netbook is supported. As previously said, I really like gnome-shell but I do notice some usabililty regression versus Gnome 3.4 on my Debian stable.

There are still a few rough edges in this beta, like broken package dependancies, but I expect this to be resolved with the official release tomorrow.

My old Canon PowerShot S3 has been faithfully serving about +11000 pictures for me, but the last year I noticed more and more noise on my pictures. Probably a sign that the CCD chip was wearing out. I really enjoyed the 12x optical Zeiss lens, but the 6 megapixel was really in need for an upgrade.

So I decided to look to the other side, and shop for a Nikon camera. Enter the D3200. I'm by no means a professional photographer, but I allways wanted to try out a DSLR camera. The thing came with a modest 18-55mm lens, which felt a bit shortcoming after my 6-72mm lens on the Canon. A new 55-300mm tele fixes that nicely, but boy, portability seems not an issue with those kind of cameras. Feels like I'm walking around with a mini bazooka or what !

I visited the Red Hat summit in Boston lately. Two and a half days of sessions about the latest and greatest of RHEL and the multiverse of software around it. I really like it, though 2.5 days is way too short in order to have the opportunity to see all interesting sessions. Most sessions even didn't have a second edition, so chosing when to see what was a real challenge. I must say I really like the Red Hat summit Android and IOS apps which offered a nice agenda/messaging interface. First convention also where I exclusively used a tablet instead of a netbook, which is really recommended.

Some time was left to visit the nice city of Boston, and do some shopping ;)

I should work for the Canonical QA team. Whenever I do something on an Ubuntu based machine, hell brakes loose.

Here I am, working on my LTS 12.4 machine, when suddenly I notice that an upgrade to a new LTS is being proposed. Weird, I thought, as 12.10 isn't a LTS. But I couldn't resist, as I got daily errors on my desktop and upgraded, only to find myself in a far worse unstable situation. So I decided to opt for the upgrade to 13.4, hoping this would fix some of the obvious bugs. Alas, something with the nautilus upgrade must have been corrupted, as my new desktop was completely unworkable. Crashing window managers, slow Xorg and worse of all, USB didn't seem to work.

This is probably not even the fault of the people at Ubuntu or Canonical. This is a workstation that has been upgraded from Dapper Drake onwards, and which contains a horrible Nvidia card which is hardly supported anymore by the nvidia/nouveau drivers.

I decided to bite the bullet, and to completely wipe my installation, and reinstall Debian 7.0 aka Wheezy from scratch. Luckily, I had my /home on an separate partition, so the upgrade path would be minimal. Top of all, it seemed that Wheezy had the nvidia-legacy-173 driver, which worked like a charm with my video card.

A default Debian desktop is still crude and spartan, so there is some more work in order to obtain a nice looking graphical environment. The Adwaita/Cupertino theme offers a nice mix of OSX and Elementary components which can compete like that with an Ubuntu setup. And yeah, Gnome-shell is a breeze to work with in comparison with Unity.