So, I’ve done a bunch of upgrades to my systems lately. After Ubuntu broke my X again somehow going from Intrepid to Jaunty (this time not recognizing my input devices), I switched over to PCLinuxOS (2009.2). I’m still getting used to it. The apt-rpm stuff seems to work well, and stuff I had to fight to get going in Ubuntu, like flashplayer and xmms, just work. Java actually runs, and there’s a desktop link to the magic for getting OpenOffice working. On the other hand, the package repository feels a lot smaller, not having programs I’ve long used like calc, ccrypt, dict, and procmeter.

WordPress had a series of security vulnerabilities, so I’ve updated to the latest version. As a plus, it finally knows about the system’s timezone database, so is no longer the only program you have to adjust an hour whenever daylight savings starts or stops. The WordPress upgrade process is getting easier, manual editing of the mysql db no longer needed. Hopefully one of these days they’ll simplify it down to “apt-get upgrade”-level, and it can keep itself up to date the same way everything else does.

I also upgraded the Easy Peasy (formerly known as Ubuntu Eee) install on my EeePC. I can’t speak about the install problems I noted in my last post on Easy Peasy, but most of the runtime problems seem to have been fixed — except the inability to turn the WiFi on! Another user put together a fix in February, but unincorporated by the maintainers. I find this bug just as staggering to find today as I did last December. How can this still not work out of the box after all this time?