Last week decided to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version 9.04, aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Although I knew from the start that there was nothing really groundbreaking in this new release, I upgraded in order to be prepared for the next release due out this October. I have read a couple of articles, here and here. The first one seems to be all worked up about about aesthetics saying Ubuntu is “now as slick and as beautiful as Mac OSX or Windows 7″. The second article seem to be more impressed with how fast 9.04 boots up and shuts down.

A quick search through Google and I find more articles talking about how slick the new release is or how fast it starts up and shuts down. If these articles are anything to go by, then the developers have clearly met one of the goals set by their BDFL, Mark Shuttleworth: Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. But I fear that the developers have focused on these goals too much that they lost focus on two of the most important things for (most) end users: system stability and seamless upgrades.

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I decided to buy a new laptop last month and after poring through reviews I decided to get an Acer Aspire 4920G. I got the submodel(?) 811g16mn which came with 1GB memory (4GB max) and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT. I bumped up the memory to the maximum 4GB to since I plan to run VMWare on Linux. The thing came with Vista Home Premium and after a bit of shoehorning to get a proper dual-boot setup to work, I started to fiddle around with Vista. In spite of all the negative press I have read about Vista, it’s not actually as bad as everyone says. I think I’m keeping Vista on this laptop, I paid for it after all.

There are a some things on this laptop that really irked me. For one, there’s the design. When the thing is closed, it looks like this black gem on your desk. While it’s not as good looking as a Macbook Pro, it’s not half bad either as long as you keep it closed. Opening it is another story, “ceramic” is just a fancy term for “all you get is a boring gray plastic finish”.

Another thing is that the keyboard has that “cheap plastic” feel to it. As a programmer, I spend inordinate amounts of time typing and a good keyboard is a must. There are times when the left Ctrl or Shift key would get stuck and it would pop out making a scary “click” sound. When I first heard that sound, I thought something had just overheated and popped.

But these are minor annoyances compared to the biggest annoyance of all.

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I was working on getting the latest GTK# to compile from source using Microsoft’s tool chain the other night. I eventually gave up because of too many errors that I just did not want to take the time to fix. However, while I was coercing the build environment trying to get things to work I kept typing “vim” out of habit on the Windows CMD window. Eventually I got tired of trying to remember that I must use either Notepad or Wordpad. So I decided to download and install Vim for Windows. I typed in vim.org on my browser’s address bar and this is what I got:

I have seen this page before. Berger had the same problem when we were moving our arsenic.ph domain to our shiny new server. Here’s what he was getting at the time:

It also appears that we were not the only ones affected by this issue. There are others who are also getting this strange page.

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So I wanted to decrypt an encfs encrypted directory on my laptop recently. I was greeted with the following error:

encfs: error while loading shared libraries: librlog.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It turns out that there has been a recent update to rlog and the encfs package was somehow left out of the rebuild. It also appears that the encfs package has disappeared from the Arch Linux Community Repository.

I have been rolling my own Arch Linux packages for quite a while now. I have been using a few locally built packages on my system. Since I already have two custom packages that I wrote myself, I figured it would be a good idea to share them. I’m too lazy to register with AUR and upload these packages and it would be likely that I would forget about updating them as well. So I am posting them here for consumption by the general public.

Download the Arch Linux source package for encfs here. To build this:

1. Make a directory to hold the files contained in the encfs source package.
2. Unpack the tarballed source package into the directory you created.
3. Install boost. Boost is a C++ library that is used by recent versions of encfs. You will also need to install fuse in case you don’t have it yet.
4. Change into the encfs source package directory you made and run makepkg -c. This will download the source for the current version of encfs. When makepkg finishes you will end up with an installable package in your current directory.
5. Install the package using pacman encfs-1.4.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz (replace encfs-1.4.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz with the correct filename for your custom-built package.)

There you go. You should have encfs working now.

You can also find pyme in my AUR directory.