Dark Liquid

I must say I’m pretty damned impressed with the new release of Xubuntu.

I’ve got everything setup nicely – and quickly – with a minimum of fuss. Got beryl running nicely, it’s fast, real fast.

There isn’t really much that is particularly obvious about this distro that distinguishes it from the last one. It just feels better, more polished and it Just Works(tm). With Beryl running, it makes MacOSX, look like a piece of crap. Installing all the codecs and what not I needed was easy too. After following some howto’s I’ve got the font rendering looking sweet, it looks as good as if not superior to MacOSX’s native font rendering.

I’ve decided to try out some new media players on Feisty, but I’ve found I’m still leaning towards Quod Libet as my media player of choice.

Exaile looked really good, and was an instant win in all categories for me except one – it didn’t remember my library. It had to process the whole thing every time it loaded, and if my music drive wasn’t mounted, I had to import the whole lot again. I don’t like having to wait 10+ minutes before I can listen to my music. Also, its album art finder just didn’t work. It just got stuck on the first item and there was no way to tell it to skip onto the next one.

Listen looked pretty awesome too. Tons of cool, useful features, but it kept crashing. I’m not sure why it did this, but the number of tracks it detected kept changing – after it had already imported my whole library – so I’m guessing that was somehow related.

So far, I’m trying out Banshee again. I didn’t like it last time but this version seems pretty good. I’ll see how it copes properly when I get home today and rip my new Porcupine Tree CD that I was listening to at work this morning.

If all else fails, I’ll stick with ‘Olde Reliable’ – Quod Libet, it’s served me well so far and it can always do so again, even if it does sometimes mess up its own music database (though I expect that was probably my own stupid fault and not the softwares).

On Feisty I’ve also found that Cedega 6 doesn’t work for me when playing Oblivion, but WINE plays fine (except the sound is screwed up). Oh well. I think I’m going to install a bunch of mods when I get home to improve the available armor, clothing and character generation / styling options because I am sad like that. I feel I have to play around with more visual mods now I have my sweet new graphics card – I need to test it out properly… right?