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Most people I know take their mobile phone with them when they leave their desks, so why not use a Bluetooth app (like this one) to lock the screen once your phone is out of range.

I did a dist-upgrade from edgy to feisty about three days ago. Nothing has gone downhill and things have only gotten better. I have had a few problems, though I write them off as transitional issues. After all, it was pre-beta software.

My biggest problem has been with the nvidia kernel module. For those who don't know, you can make sure this is installed properly by doing:

sudo aptitude install linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` nvidia-glx

This is all well and good but for some reason the nvidia kernel module was just randomly disappearing! No joke. I ended up using module-assistant (sudo it) to build my own nvidia module, which worked great, and got everything working again.

There is a new restricted module manager which explicitly informs you that you are using restricted modules, which may not be supported. The system may have made it easy for you to install binary drivers, but it makes damned sure that you know you're using them and what the downside is.

The network-manager gains zeroconf support in this release, but there's still no WPA options in the network-manager. I thought that was coming in this release? I have network-manager-gnome installed, but it doesn't look anything like this. So I don't know WTF is going on. And I'm in the middle of installing a bunch of packages so I can't find out at this moment, either. The default driver may not support WPA, I wouldn't know, but my network-manager applet still is a pale ghost of what I'm seeing in screenshots.

In general, what most beta users of Feisty are going to notice in comparison to Edgy is graphical. Various theme elements have changed slightly. The biggest change, of course, is the official inclusion of binary drivers, which is much easier to get working. You won't need envy to get those nvidia drivers working any more (assuming you were unable or unwilling to do the install manually, envy seems to have been the most common way to install 'em.) Envy, of course, does not support Feisty.

Early adopters will note that EasyUbuntu and Automatix both still lack Feisty support. Way to test and be ahead of the curve, guys. But of course that's not Ubuntu's fault.

This is a lot less painless than my last experience, attempting to upgrade a somewhat tweaked dapper to edgy. This system is no less tweaked, but the dist-upgrade went fine.

Stallman wrote an article about this last year. It's well worth the read.

A Swedish translation.

I used the SuSE 10 distribution for the study, which in fact turned out quite well. It would be quite interesting to compare this to, say Gnome or just another distribution like Kubuntu. Hopefully I will get to that later.

Read the study.

A couple of days ago I did an informal usability test, where I got someone to try installing the new SuSE 10 distribution. While there are still some quirks and odd ends, it is really coming along nicely.

The test can be read here: http://johnny.chadda.se/2005/10/10/determining-the -usability-of-installing-and-using-suse-10/

I really like the use of AJAX in Google's (and others) web applications. The downside is of course that older and text based browsers won't be able to render the pages.

I have tried Google Reader and it looks good so far. I am currently importing my Bloglines RSS feeds to the Google Reader, but it takes its time. I will post an update on my site when I have done som more extensive testing of the service.

http://johnny.chadda.se/2005/10/07/google-announce s-new-rss-reader/

I tried downloading the torrents from the ftp a while back and it was bogged. I have a copy of them, if their servers get bogged down again at http://johnny.chadda.se/2005/10/06/suse-100-finall y-released/

By the way, I have tried the 10.0 RC1 and it was really great. The only thing not working is my P910i sync, but I'll work on that. :)