I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 beta recently. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The good:

  • Network Manager has been significantly improved…although…the improvements do not affect me and I’m quite comfortable using the old version
  • More applications are being supported by Ubuntu
  • VLC 0.9.2 was included despite the feature freeze
  • Better driver support, my iphone is now successfully detected
  • Better xorg support, but doesn’t really affect me since I have it setup correctly anyway

The bad:

  • There is a “sound” lag, where the welcome sound would begin playing when my desktop has loaded rather than in the process of loading
  • The “shutdown” icon on the top right hand corner is no longer a “shutdown” icon but rather a “logout” icon, and I can’t seem to change it back
  • The desktop loading time is noticeably longer
  • Still the same old crappy NTFS support, I copied 40gigs worth of movies to my NTFS external hdd, safely ejected it, plugged it into a Windows machine and I had to conduct a detect and repair to be able to recover 70% of the files

Well, it’s still in beta so hopefully when the final gets released in 4 weeks time, it’ll be more solid :)

I also developed a more efficient method of playing dota :)

The problem that I faced was that Compiz doesn’t support full screen games that well, it’s extremely buggy. So what I had to do previous was:

  1. Open terminal
  2. Type in “metacity –replace”
  3. cd into the directory and then run wine on warcraft
  4. Type “compiz –replace” when the game has closed to bring back compiz

The problem was that sometimes when I close down the terminal it would revert back to metacity…or even have no window manager running.

Eventually it turned into this:

  1. Open up compiz icon
  2. Change to metacity using the drop down from compiz icon
  3. Open up terminal
  4. cd into the directory and then run wine on warcraft
  5. Change to compiz using drop down when warcraft ends

It fixed the previous problem, has one extra step, but it saves keystrokes.

I recently added some custom commands to my Ubuntu box.

Command 1: metacity –replace
Command 2: sh -c “cd /media/sda1/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ 3 && wine w3l.exe”
Command 3: compiz –replace

I had shortcuts affiliated with the commands being “Shift F#” where # is the command number.

So now my steps to run Warcraft three is:

  1. Shift F1 to change to metacity
  2. Shift F2 to run Warcraft
  3. Shift F3 to change back to compiz when Warcraft have ended

All I need to do now is work out a way in script form to run metacity and then Warcraft and only run Compiz once Warcraft has ended.

Edit 6/10/08:

I’ve now reduced the number of steps to running Warcraft to 1.

  1. Press Shift F2

The main problem I was facing previously was the fact that Full Screen Games refused to run in fullscreen under Compiz. But recently I discovered that you could setup Window Rules through Compiz. I setup a rule that forces applications with the title “Warcraft” to run in full screen. I also decided to disable some plugins…namely “Expo” and “Scale” to make running of Warcraft “smoother”. I never really used those two plugins, they were there mainly for show. But yes. I guess I have achieved O(1) procrastination. Yay!