I can't believe that almost two months after the release of Intrepid Ibex, the issue of wireless cards not working remains unresolved! Bollocks to the open source community whose endless rhetoric would have us believe that they respond rapidly to address pressing needs.

On the whole, the upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid has been absolutely abysmal. Problems experienced immediately:

• Wireless no longer works
• KDE 4 crashes with regular abandon
• During shutdown, system hangs while unloading ALSA
• Sound not working due to the problem with ALSA

After using KDE as my preferred desktop environment for the past few years, I've had to remove it and revert to GNOME, just to continue working without interruption. I STILL can't use my wireless on the 2.6.27* kernel and have to reboot with the 2.6.24* kernel when I have no alternative but to use wireless. Thankfully I hadn't upgraded my servers and these remain on Hardy - looks like I'll go the LTS option with these then! As for my laptop, I'm not a happy camper. I sincerely hope that this experience is a once-off and not an indication of what we'll be getting from Linux\Ubuntu in the future!

Time on my hands

So my studies have finished and work's up to date and I can start configuring my network to how I've actually wanted it for a year or so! Busy installing Hardy Heron on the server and will be creating a DMZ with my two routers and installing squid proxy and dansgaurdian to limit access to undesirable web sites. I'll be getting to grips with iptables too, to apply firewall rules.

Who said life has to be boring!

What will history really show?

OK, so maybe all that history will show is that I've got better things to do (or maybe just other things, not necessarily better) ... or maybe I'm just lazy? Anyhoo, some stuff happened since my last blog post, however I'm sure no-one's interested - I'm certainly not really interested in typing it all up. So, what I can say is that I'm busy getting ready to watch the Springboks play the All Blacks on TV. Holly is sitting next to me browsing barbie.com and nattering on about the beautiful fairy princess outfit she's just created and Tracey's just told me that Phoebe is watching the Springboks sing the National anthem on their own. So, for now I'm off to participate in the real world!