Dark Liquid

I must say, I’m really pleased with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. I installed it on my macbook yesterday and it works like a charm. Wireless didn’t work out of the box but by following the Ubuntu Macbook Howto things went pretty smoothly. My wireless works perfectly on the madwifi driver with NetworkManager, compiz works nicely and I have a nice, fancy desktop, sound works, the touchpad works with two-finger scrolling and multi-finger tapping for clicking. It’s generally a really solid build and I’m very impressed. The only issue I had was booting it up for the first time. rEFIt just wouldn’t boot the partition. It would show the penguin logo but just hang. After updating it from version 0.9 to version 0.11 though, everything worked fine.

I’m really enjoying Firefox 3. The new features make it so much easier to use and things I was using plugins for are now either built in or have better equivalents integrated into the main app. The only downside is that Google Browser Sync doesn’t work with Firefox 3, which is a real shame. However, since I use the del.icio.us plugin for my bookmarks, it’s not a complete show stopper.

I’m also posting this directly from my desktop, deciding to give a desktop blogging client a go. I’m using the gnome panel applet gnome-blog 0.9.1 so we’ll see how it goes.

All in all, Hardy Heron in a phenomenal piece of work and I’m blown away by it. Once the new free-as-in-freedom madwifi drivers support the wireless, I see no reason why most of the macbook hacks and stuff can’t be enabled by default or at least be wrapped into a script so you can go into the admin and enable ‘Macbook compatibility mode’ with a warning about possible non-free things being installed/enabled/etc. Being able to just install linux on a macbook and be ready to go would be awesome.

In other news, I’ve been reading the rulebook for Promethean: The Created and I’ve fallen in love with the setting and the general theme of it all. I’ve come up with a character concept based around a promiscuous female Muse of Aurum, who roves from college to college, university to university trying to understand the human condition by immersing herself in student culture and sex.

Speaking of the new World of Darkness, it looks like we’ll be playing a Werewolf: The Forsaken game. I was homing for a Changeling: The Lost game, but we were out-voted by the other players. Our GM is good at what he does, so I’m sure he can reach a good balance of roleplaying for Dru and I and hack-and-slashing for the others.

It looks like I will be starting either one of my own roleplays this coming Wednesday. After pestering people with Facebook I eventually created an event and invited people to it. I’ve had just enough responses to make running a game worthwhile. I’m hoping to run both games alternately, but we’ll see what the players go for. You’ll be able to keep up with the games’ progressions on my Obsidian Portal page.