On Karmic Beta

On Friday last week I happened to upgrade certain packages on my erstwhile Jaunty installation on my laptop. For some strange reason my touchpad ceased to work. I couldn’t move the mouse pointer. I couldn’t even get onto good ole’ Google because I couldn’t click on NetworkManager and select the radio button next to my CDMA USB modem entry!

The next day I issued a ‘do-release-upgrade’ and headed out to watch Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” with Debayan and Vignesh. After I returned there was still an hour to go and so I continued to bootstrap my Debian-armel on the SD card for the Beagle board. And when it was all over, I had Karmic!

So, the touchpad worked now. Somewhat. I couldn’t tap on the touchpad to click on things like the menubar entries and so on. Turns out that Systems > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad has a button which says “Enable mouse clicks with touchpad” disabled by default. I, on the other hand, could make my way through up to this point with the keyboard alone and enabled it. Phew.

The improvements from Jaunty are, as expected, quite a lot. And visibly so.

Take the shiny new 2.6.31 kernel, for example. It boots fast. And supports kernel mode setting for the revamped X. The improvements are so obvious that you can’t afford to not say “wow”. I haven’t done the “full-screen flash video” test yet, but I do like the snappiness when I switch between virtual consoles and X. Once again, I can live with the minimal compiz that’s turned on by default on an Ubuntu installation. Oh, and I did have another oh-that’s-new moment with the volume control. It doesn’t look like the old one but it does look like an incomplete version of the Windows 7-style volume manager. I couldn’t find a way to mute my laptop speakers and let all sound be audible only via my earphones. Thankfully, alsamixer works.

UPDATE: It turns out that selecting “Analog Headphones” under Sound Preferences > Output does the trick.

So far so good. Upgrading moar. Oh, and don’t forget ‘do-release-upgrade -d’ in a screen session. Also, E17 looks kickass.

On Public Transportation

On reading Rubenérd’s post on Australian public transport, I wrote up a quick comment and at the last minute decided to make my own blog post instead.

The Metro-Rail construction work in Bangalore is going at a very slow pace and since it’s being constructed right in the middle of several important “link” roads, traffic is dismal at times. And, Bangalore also happens to be the hub for most “high-end”, multi-national company-employed settlers who flaunt their cars and whatnot in these congested roads often driving with nobody else (what a waste!)

Additionally, there are these “Think Big. Live Big. Buy an SUV” car loan schemes which are advertised on radios too. Long traffic jams are an everyday reality.

As I was researching information for this blog post, I hit upon this. Yes! Bangalore might end up having both metro-rail and mono-rail. It’s an interesting combination given the radially outgoing roads of Bangalore and the ring-roads that connect them at several places.

Public transport is more or less bearable in the southern Indian states, Maharashtra and Goa. (Unsure about the other states). The problem with buses is specific to the crowded mess of a city called Bangalore with its myriad of one-ways and outright stupid traffic sense of the auto-rickshaw drivers. Many college-going students end up wasting a lot of time just trying to commute between their homes and colleges. The alternate modes of transport which I believe are sensibly conceived should help Bangalore breathe well again.

On Pixel Smoothened and Bitmap Fonts

Having gotten used to pixel-smoothed fonts on the Gnome terminal for quite a while now, I opened up an xterm for some reason and ran an htop in it. This different look of the fonts (bitmap fonts?) made me pause for a moment there and say to myself, “wow”.