Loudness Equalization. This effect, which is just a plain vanilla volume compressor, is, in today’s YouTube-obsessed culture, an absolute killer feature. The original intent of this feature, as could be expected, was to eliminate the dynamic contrast in DVD movies so that viewers can watch a movie relatively quietly without either disturbing others or else missing dialogue in softer sections. However, as the popularity of YouTube has grown, it has a new, absolutely essential function: combating ear rape.

Ear rape isn’t funny. It isn’t amusing, cool, or creative. It’s imbecilic, obnoxious, and it pisses me off to no end when YouTube video authors do it (usually in YouTube Poop videos). I’ve been searching for a long time for a way to eliminate its effects that doesn’t rely on specific, proprietary solutions offered by/requiring the use of aftermarket soundcards. I was going about it the wrong way—I thought there might be a Firefox plugin that could somehow shim in between the Flash plugin and the sound subsystem, making for a truly cross-platform solution. Sadly, this hasn’t been realized (if it’s even possible). But while searching aimlessly through the settings in my Windows 7 partition, I found the following dialog:

By default, it’s off. Just click the check mark and hit Apply, and it should be activated. The feature isn’t very customizable—the release is the only parameter you can set—but it works fairly well. It doesn’t catch everything, but it does enough that I can watch YouTube videos now without having to constantly adjust the volume. Of course, you can use this for its intended purpose as well—just pop in a DVD and the dynamics should be ironed out pretty nicely. On the other hand, it’s a bit cumbersome to have to keep remembering to turn it on and off. Still, I’m very glad it exists. YouTube is a tamer, gentler place because of it.

That having been said, perhaps you have some misgivings about the objectivity of the review to come. Rest assured, I have extremely high standards (as this blog entry about the experience of purchasing the machine should make clear) and I will leave no stone unturned in this review. I may even add to it as I think of things I forgot. And, to be honest, I’ll back off of my superlatives at the beginning: there are a few things I can criticize about my HP dv6-1355dx. And I’ll list all half dozen of them during the course of this review.

Description (Specs, Aesthetics, etc.)

Instead of separating these categories (which bleed into one another, anyway), I’ll combine them. Spec-wise, the HP isn’t an unheard-of collection. Here’s a really good run-down. The major features include an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 processor (2.2 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache), 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 500 GB HDD (5400 RPM SATA), 15.6″ 1366 x 768 pixel LED-backlit display, Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics, three USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA/USB 2.0 port, an HDMI output, a VGA output, etc. Follow the link for a more complete picture. For the $679.99 paid at Best Buy, this is quite a machine. It represents that hallowed 85% region, where you can spend hundreds of dollars more but at most only achieve an extra 15% (except for graphics performance, which of course increases exponentially with the addition of dedicated graphics hardware).

Physical Description

Make no mistake: this thing is quite a beast. The word “portable” definitely does not come to mind with this machine, even more so than with my former behemoth, a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4014. The HP is an inch wider than the Satellite, yet in my estimation it’s slightly lighter. Either way, it’s a six pound plus machine that fits even more poorly than my old Satellite on the little strips of wood they call “desks” at Wayne State. My initial inclination was toward a 14″ or smaller machine, but I decided to go the notebook + netbook route instead, which allowed me to select a larger machine.

The HP dv6-1355dx is black with an imprinted pattern of bubbles and something that looks like cartographic lines—or else sound waves emanating from a sound source. Either way, it’s pretty subtle in medium-to-dim light, so it’s not distracting. The finish on this notebook is your typical ultra shiny plastic that collects fingerprints far too easily. Around the edge of the bottom half of the notebook is a silver plastic rim which looks pretty classy, though the seams on each side where the two halves of this meet don’t. In particular the right side is a poor match. The  main problem I can see with this design feature is that the plastic rim will eventually get gouged and pitted unless it’s really durable.

Screen, Keyboard, and Trackpad

The screen on this machine is simply gorgeous. I never put it on full brightness; it’s like staring into the sun if you do. Compared to the putrid, orangey-greenish tint and depressing dimness of my Satellite’s screen, the HP’s is like a revelation. White looks—well, white. Maybe there’s a slight bluey-periwinkle tint (on account of the LED backlight), but when referenced against itself (i.e. if it’s the only screen in the room) you won’t notice this—on the Toshiba I was never unaware that white looked hideously wrong and that the screen was dim. Colors aren’t particularly accurate—when compared to a properly-calibrated Samsung LCD HDTV (extremely highly regarded), our business website looks far too blue, and reds and greens look slightly subdued in general. However, when again compared only to itself the effect is very pleasing. When compared to my old Toshiba, the latter’s screen looked as though it had a dark, orangish filter stuck over it. This is a definite upgrade over my Satellite, and across the three makes I considered—Toshiba, Asus, and HP—the last had in my judgment the best screens.

The keyboard on the dv6-1355dx feels very nice. The keybed is very solid; flexing it is possible but difficult. Key travel doesn’t feel too springy or too mushy; it’s just about right. The tops of the keys are glossy (like the rest of the case), which might at first seem like an odd choice. Take a look at your own keyboard right now. Unless you just bought your computer, I guarantee you that your keyboard by now looks glossy. Keys wear down. Both HP and Toshiba seem to have figured out that it makes no sense to use textured keys, as they’ll just end up unevenly worn six months after they enter service and will look even worse than if they all just started out smooth.

The layout of the keys is pretty standard, and the keystrokes register easily and without fail. I haven’t found any that stick or otherwise give me trouble. These are not the “island” keys that have been gaining popularity, but the standard square kind with slightly sloped edges. The main drawback of this design is that it’s (theoretically) easier to accidentally hit keys; additionally, dirt falls through the cracks more easily and there seems to be a never-ending supply of it after a while, which resurfaces each time you close the lid and transport the device. It’s too early to tell if this will be as bad a problem as it was with the Satellite.

The F-keys have separate functions mapped to them, which are toggled via a combination of an F-key and the Function (Fn) key. These include backlight brightness, sleep and lock functions, multimedia controls, etc. There are no analog controls on this machine, which could either be good or bad (depending on if your OS has support for these functions—more on this later). These controls are very easy to use and have presented no problems to me. There are gaps between every four F-keys, and functions within these sets are logically grouped.

The trackpad feels very nice, though not quite as nice as that of my Satellite (there, you see, a criticism!) on account of the former’s somewhat slick surface. Still, control is excellent, and the actual pad real estate is a generous 4″ x 2″ (though some of this is taken up by the scroll strip on the right). The pad is slightly recessed, though not so much as that of my Satellite. Vertical scrolling works fairly well, though it seems a little more finicky than on my Satellite. The HP likes you to be right on the silk-screened line, or else you’ll find yourself sliding your finger with nary an effect.

Right and left mouse clicks are handled by the standard two separate buttons, and these feel very nice: they’re plenty large and depress with minimal pressure but deliver a solid click. They, like the touchpad itself, match the silver plastic rim of the case. In addition, for those who like to turn off the touchpad when they type (usually while using a USB mouse), there’s a button directly above the trackpad for this (located in a much more logical place than the corresponding button on my Asus Eee PC). This button is somewhat small and stiff, likely to prevent accidental depression by those who are not looking to activate this feature.

Located above the keyboard is a set of touch-sensitive controls. There’s a mute on/off toggle, a volume adjustment strip, and a wireless receiver on/off toggle. All the status lights on the HP are white LEDs, except for the mute and wireless off lights—which are reddish-orange—and the wireless on light, which (for some strange reason) is blue. This last one messes up the aesthetics for me; we were so close to leaving behind the cliche blue LEDs but for this misstep. These controls work adequately, though the volume strip is kind of touchy.

Performance

I haven’t really opened up this machine and given it a strenuous performance test, but I’ve done quite a bit of multi-tasking and it handles everything in stride. YouTube HD 720p works flawlessly, as well. I suspect that 1080p would work perfectly, too, except that YouTube seems to be having trouble with the prebuffer—I’m on a very fast Ethernet connection here at Wayne, so bandwidth isn’t a problem. This test 1080p video stuttered horribly streaming from the site, but when I downloaded it and played it in Totem (on Ubuntu Linux) it was absolutely silky smooth (and gorgeous on the HP’s screen, might I add, such as this video is). In Linux one core or the other (the load kept switching) hovered around 70% with occasional peaks of around 90%, but there was absolutely no stuttering. I haven’t tested this in Windows 7 yet, but if it’s this good in Ubuntu, I can scarcely imagine it being worse in Windows, with the full benefit of official Intel drivers.

In general, UI elements draw lightning quick, and the overall experience feels quite snappy no matter which OS I’m on (Ubuntu or 7). The performance of the Core 2 Duo T6600 is roughly double that of the Core Duo T2400 that powers my Satellite, and while the latter was definitely no slouch, I recall that on the Satellite the release candidate of Windows 7 felt a little sluggish. I’m aware that (especially) RAM (both speed and quantity), FSB, and the hard drive all contribute to the overall speed equation, and since all are updated compared to those on my previous machine it’s difficult to say how much of a bearing the processor might have on any performance increase on the part of the HP. Still, anybody who feels that Windows 7 is bloated and slow isn’t running it on the right hardware—try a C2D with 4 GB of RAM and be amazed.

Battery Life

Used conservatively, this notebook has given me around three hours of battery life. Used aggressively (i.e. brightness jacked up, constant multitasking), around two is more realistic. This ain’t a netbook, and like I keep saying, most of the time it should be plugged in, anyway. It’s an immediate improvement over my Satellite, which currently has a battery life of about two minutes. All laptop batteries wear out after about two years, and for the last year of its life the Satellite had around ten minutes of battery life. Still, this one has better life right out of the gate compared to my Satellite when it was new, so I’m quite impressed. It’s glorious to be able to lie back on my bed after a day of squinting at the microscopic text on my Eee and bask in the luxuriousness of a proper notebook screen. It’s even better knowing it will last longer than ten minutes before the battery dies.

Multimedia

I really wish I had a DVD (or a dozen) here on campus to test out the multimedia capabilities of this machine more, but rest assured that all the component parts should add up to a wonderful experience. I can say (with a sigh of relief, might I add) that the audio on this HP is excellent. The speakers aren’t great, but the actual audio hardware itself is wonderful. Very clean, free of distortion, a more spacious soundstage than that of the iPod on which I do most of my music listening (known for its rather closed soundstage, though still a benchmark standard), and with zero detectable amplifier noise at full volume. It’s on par with the sound I got from my Creative Audigy2 ZS Notebook (which, while it sounded very nice, was both cheaply made—it’s in pieces now—and which often suffered from skips and pops in the audio due to poor chipset compatibility). This is great because now I don’t need to have that card sticking out of the side of my computer. In fact, I can’t install this card on the HP because it still uses the ancient PCMCIA connection, which most computers had already left behind even when I bought my Satellite in 2006.

The screen, as evidenced in my preview of that YouTube HD video, is perfect for movies. Additionally, this notebook comes with an HDMI output, so you can hook up a 1080p HDTV and view your content that way if you so choose. I tested this feature and found it works perfectly. Windows 7 makes it trivial to set up an HDTV as a second monitor, and this dual-head setup yielded no noticeable slowdown. Sadly, the dv6-1355dx lacks a Blu-ray player, but there is a plethora of online video content—both free and for pay—and you should thus not be strapped to find content to enjoy with the dv6-1355dx. Plus, if you just gotta have Blu-ray, external drives are available. Trust me, this is not a “portable” computer—it belongs on a desk, or else hooked up to a gigantic HDTV and controlled via a wireless keyboard and mouse. An external drive, therefore, isn’t as much of a tether as you might imagine.

Experience

This is kind of a woolly section, but sometimes a bunch of nice specs and features don’t really add up to a great overall experience. In fact, it’s so far the opposite of this in the case of the HP dv6-1355dx that it’s remarkable. Using this machine over the past few days has been an absolute joy. Ubuntu brought with it a few hiccups, but that was because I opted for the 64-bit version, which has known problems with Adobe Flash (more below). Windows 7 has worked flawlessly. Throughout I’ve never felt that the machine lacked something I wish it had, nor that I was ever waiting an undue amount of time for the computer to complete a task. That said, coming from a 1280 x 800 pixel screen resolution I was a little disappointed at how little difference the HP’s extra 86 pixels horizontal resolution has made—and how much of an annoyance the lost 34 pixels of vertical resolution has become. The main offender is YouTube, where accessing the controls now requires scrolling—the video just fits, but I can’t monitor the playback progress without scrolling down. Pitiful. Resizing Firefox’s icons doesn’t help; in both Windows 7 and Ubuntu I have this problem.

But this is picayune. I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel to dig up dirt on this computer.

Crapware

This is probably my biggest complaint. My God did this thing ship with a boatload of crapware! I spent three hours cleansing this machine of virtually everything that wasn’t stock. HP even had the nerve to integrate the Wild Tangent games into the Games Explorer window in a way that required me to hack the Registry in order to delete their entries (the software itself had already been removed). Some of the software might have been useful—HP had a lot of multimedia software and supplementary programs for various other tasks, but I like a clean, lean, and mean system. Plus, I can download it all from HP’s website if I really want any single piece of software back again.

Compatibility with Linux

Wow. Just…wow. I have never had such an amazing Linux experience as I have so far had on the dv6-1355dx. I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic 64-bit on here, and…get this…every single thing worked! I grazed my finger across the volume strip, sure it wouldn’t function, but to my utter shock a volume overlay appeared in the upper right corner. I tried various function keys—brightness, multimedia controls, sleep—everything works absolutely perfectly. These never worked on my Satellite, no matter how many workarounds I tried. I swear, it’s like Ubuntu was made on this HP laptop which, of course, I know is quite absurd. Flash was whack, of course, but I found a workaround that fixed the non-responsive Flash video controls (which was the main thing keeping me from using Ubuntu full time on this computer). And just today I noticed another annoying bug, where the sound would not stop playing through the onboard speakers when headphones were plugged in. Another workaround exists (when I rediscover the sources of these, I’ll post links) that handily fixed the problem.

Performance is insanely great. Granted, performance was wonderful on my Toshiba Satellite, too, and it’s almost unfair that Windows 7 performs so well on this laptop—it always used to be that Windows was a bit sluggish and Ubuntu reigned supreme. Now the two are roughly equivalent in day-to-day use, and both run better than Ubuntu did on my Satellite. I’m not sure how much of this performance delta can be attributed to my choice of 64-bit Ubuntu (the T2400 didn’t support x86-64), but the UI is ultra-responsive. Multimedia applications work wonderfully, and video playback is top notch—as evidenced by that 1080p test video. I never downloaded the test video and played it on the Satellite, but I can’t imagine that it would play well—I will definitely make a point of testing this.

If I wanted to present the uninitiated a taste of Linux, I would drag out my dv6-1355dx and let them have a go on it—the OS is truly showcased on this machine, not simply because it performs so well, but because it worked virtually perfectly out of the box. I’m reminded just why I love Ubuntu so much when I use this machine—it positively flies on this hardware, and its resource usage is better than Windows 7 can ever hope to be. Case in point, I have Firefox open with a dozen tabs, several Nautilus windows minimized, Rhythmbox playing, and System Monitor running, and all told the OS is using around 620 MB of RAM. A similar scenario on Windows 7 would already be bumping up against 1.5 GB or so. In neither case would this machine be overly taxed—after all, it has 4 GB of RAM (and I can expand this up to 8 GB). But with Ubuntu I have far greater headroom, and Ubuntu is clearly far more efficient.

Final Words

Like I said before, it has been a long time since I’ve been this thoroughly impressed with a product. The HP dv6-1355dx is an absolute slam dunk. Aside from those who can only buy one computer and who need something ultra-portable, or those who need extreme gaming performance, I can’t think of anybody whom this computer wouldn’t please…unless it’s a Mac person, and we all know they’re hopeless. All kidding aside (I love Apple, really), this machine is phenomenal, not simply because it performed everything well right out of the box, but because even after melding it to my strict and specific software profile, it still managed to do everything near perfectly. I would have loved it even more if I hadn’t had to spend three hours cleaning out all the crapware, but at this point that’s water under the bridge. I’ve got Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 running in perfect harmony, and I couldn’t be happier.

If you need portable, get a netbook (and I did). If you want a great desktop replacement notebook, the HP dv6-1355dx would make an excellent choice. I award this laptop a perfect five-out-of-five. Absolutely phenomenal.

However, I recognize that as I grew familiar with Linux in general, my objectivity as a reviewer from the point of view of the “average Joe switcher” has waned. That having been said, I think I can still say that with the upcoming 9.10 Karmic Koala release, Ubuntu is a truly viable option for many users. Will it launch to meteoric heights, above and beyond any previous release? No, probably not. But it could. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is the best version of Ubuntu yet, and it just may be the thing that unhinges you in your desire to finally plunge headfirst into a dual-boot or exclusively Linux computing lifestyle.

Karmic Koala: The Rundown

Installation is almost identical to that of any previous Ubuntu release. Basically, the installer asks a few simple questions, then launches into the meat of the process with a screen with three options: one which shrinks down any existing OSs to make room for Ubuntu, one which installs Ubuntu as the only OS (purging anything else that might be on the disk), and the Custom option, which I always use. This requires a working knowledge of partitioning, but since I’ve been using Ubuntu since long before the first two options were present, I had already learned how to use the included GParted partitioning utility to divvy up my disk.

In my latest installation I decided to go whole hog and install Karmic as my sole OS. I also made a separate 50 GB partition for my /home directory. None of this is any more difficult than usual and simply requires that you can discern which drive is which in a list, tell the OS what to put where, and know that the two components you must include are the root (/) and swap partitions, the latter of which should be at least equivalent in size to the amount of RAM you have installed in your computer (or, in most cases, 1 GB should be plenty).

After a confirmation screen you’re off to the races and are treated to a slide show enumerating the benefits of Ubuntu. Using a flash drive installation completed in about ten minutes. If you would like to use a flash drive yourself, I suggest you download this utility if you’re using Windows. Ubuntu has a USB Startup Disk Creator of its own, but of course you have to be using Ubuntu in order to use it, so it’s a Catch 22.

The Desktop Environment

Look and feel

When you first reboot, you’ll be greeted by the desktop below.

Well, that’s not exactly it, but I’m not masochistic enough to undo all my customizations just for a screen shot. It’s your standard two-panel Gnome affair, minus the extra icons on the left and the Gnome Foot in the corner. Ubuntu is back, and browner than ever! There are so many debates about this subject, and I personally think all this brown looks like something the cat left on the stair, but it is what it is. It’s easy enough to change, and all the pictures that follow will be of my current theme, which I stuck together from several I downloaded from GNOME-Look.org.

The first thing you should notice, aside from that violent orange background, is that the icons are different. Gone are those godawful Human icons, and in their place is an elegant collection called Humanity, which were made by DanRabbit. Here’s a screen shot with some folders open to give you a better idea (by the way, I use Spatial Nautilus instead of the default Browser setting):

Ah, bliss. All I did was install the Shiki-Colors theme, select the default Humanity icons, and tweak the color of window backgrounds slightly, and I got my theme. Oh, and I replaced the Ubuntu Friendship Circle with the Gnome Foot. You can download an archive I’ve made with everything you need to recreate my theme (plus instructions) here.

Essentially, this isn’t that much different from previous releases, except that there is more of a focus on the yellow and brown tones and less on the orange. Though you can’t see it in the first screen shot, the window borders are chocolate brown, ala the following:

We’ll stick with “chocolate,” as the bathroom humor might get out of hand if we touch on the “other” interpretation. Despite my obvious dislike, this isn’t awful. It goes along with the default GDM and xsplash (that stuff you see when you boot up) well enough, and the Humanity icons are a real win when compared with the original Human ones. Overall, the fit and feel of this Ubuntu release are pretty high, even at the beta stage. There are some hiccups, though. For example, the “Applying changes” box for some inexplicable reason lacks an icon, resulting in an ugly “no icon” placeholder. Also, those who like translucent Panels will find the notification icons in Humanity unreadable. I expect the former condition to be worked out by the final release. The too-short, unreadable progress bar issue has already been dealt with.

One real gripe of mine concerns dark themes. OpenOffice.org looks quite horrid with Shiki-Colors, and since Ubuntu ships several dark themes as defaults (even if they’re not activated by default), I seriously would have hoped something better could have been done about theme integration. As it stands, this screen shot should tell you everything you need to know:

Yeah, okay. Is it Arbitrary Day or something over in Menu Designer Nook? And notice the too-thick and too-dark borders around items in the Status and Ruler Bars. The theme integration is handled by the openoffice.org-gtk package, and removing it drops you back to an even uglier UI with absolutely no Gnome integration. Dark themes are fairly young on Ubuntu (they first got some official love in Jaunty), so perhaps in time this will be sorted out. Until then, I’ll live with this but grumble loudly about it the whole way.

Firefox is another instance of bad consequences tied to a dark theme. The Awesome Bar will produce a dark dropdown menu, which looks awful. However, the solution (for Shiki-Colors, at least) is documented here and works swimmingly.

Applications and Gnome 2.28

Karmic ships with Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice.org 3.1, GIMP 2.6, and a new version of the popular Add/Remove Applications called Ubuntu Software Center. All other applications not specific to Ubuntu or culled from third parties are of the Gnome 2.28 vintage, and the repositories reflect this. Notably, the popular IM client Pidgin has been replaced with the Gnome default, Empathy. This has caused quite a lot of controversy, and after a rather hellish experience with Empathy recursively opening itself ere a hard reset, I decided I wanted nothing more to do with it. I installed Pidgin from the Software Center but plan on giving Empathy another look come the final release of Karmic.

The remainder of the software suite should feel very familiar to Ubuntu natives, but for the uninitiated I’ll run down the basic list:

Internet Browsing: Firefox 3.5
IM: Empathy 2.28.0
Video/Quick Music Playback: Totem 2.28.1
Music Management: Rhythmbox 0.12.5
Photo Management: F-Spot 0.6.1.3
Photo Manipulation/Editing: GIMP 2.6
E-Mail/Calendaring: Evolution 2.28.0
BitTorrent: Transmission 1.75
Office Software: OpenOffice.org 3.1
Disc Burning: Brasero 2.28.0

There are of course others for scanning, terminal services, and the like, but most users will be concerned with the above list. I’ve given each of these (except for Empathy) a cursory glance, and here’s what I’ve found:

1. Firefox works as well as ever, with the slight dark theme incompatibility ironed out via the instructions listed earlier. Still the best browser out there, on account of the Add-ons community.
2. Empathy, as mentioned before, didn’t get any formal testing yet.
3. Totem tends to hang on shutdown, often requiring a Force Quit (or even a kill at the command line). Other than that, once stocked with codecs, it plays everything I throw at it.
4. Rhythmbox is a capable music manager, along the lines of iTunes or Winamp. Until recently there was a bug by which it couldn’t play back audio CDs, but this has been dealt with in a recent update.
5. F-Spot is a simple program and does its job well enough. I tend toward gThumb instead, but F-Spot is fine.
6. GIMP is an interesting creature. All through this review I’ve prepared screen shots using it, and it has done everything I have asked it. I never found myself wanting of a more powerful tool (e.g. Photoshop), but my needs are fairly basic. I still hate the floating palettes (didn’t they learn anything from Office 2004 for Mac?), but the software works just fine.
7. When I use it, Evolution performs admirably. It knows (based on the domain) that I have a Gmail address and automatically configures its settings for IMAP in the startup routine that runs the first time I run the program. I’ve never had any problems with this program, and it works well enough in Karmic—granted, I don’t have particularly deep needs.
8. Transmission works fine. A decent, lightweight BitTorrent client.
9. OpenOffice, despite the appearance issues with dark themes, works perfectly for me so far. The fact that it’s in Karmic won’t be your determiner—either you like it and it works for you, or else you’ll run Office 2007 via Wine or VirtualBox. The choice is yours.
10. I haven’t used Brasero yet in Karmic, but in the past it has proved to be a capable program. So unless it’s totally broken in Karmic (which I’ll never know since I haven’t bought blank CD-Rs in about two years) it should accomplish whatever burning task you’d like to accomplish (except obviously something like Blu-Ray).

I would suggest you download the following to supplement the above:

VLC Media Player
Sound Juicer
FileZilla FTP
Pidgin (?)

VLC doesn’t quite match up to Rhythmbox when playing CDs—its playback ranges from almost smooth to like an old portable CD player with the anti-shock shut off. Tragically, VLC absolutely could not handle playing at the same time as Evolution checked the mail servers—it started skipping and, comically, it rose an entire semitone in pitch! It stayed like this until dismissed and restarted once Evolution was done. I can only assume that if you do anything similarly “strenuous”, such as checking for updates, uploading/downloading a torrent or using FTP, you’ll get the same problem. Yecch! Maybe it just doesn’t like Peter Gabriel? Understandable, but probably not the issue. Still, I guess if you need to access the audio on a CD VLC will work. You can rip using VLC but it’s an awkward, one-track-at-a-time affair, with no progress feedback other than the sound of your disc drive.

On the other hand, VLC has a much better reputation with video playback, and many have turned to it when Totem threw up the Dickens. It’s a good tool to have as it often works (at least to some extent) even when other players get broken or encounter weird corner case media files.

Sound Juicer is a very simple Gnome program which allows for extraction of multiple CD audio tracks in one session. It’s a lot more intuitive than the VLC method. If you want to just rip from a CD and don’t want to deal with the Rhythmbox interface, this will work well. In order to get WAV encoding to work properly, I had to modify the “Voice, Lossless” preset and save it as “CD Quality (WAV)”. Here’s the GStreamer pipeline in order to get normal WAV output:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! wavenc name=enc

Tick the “Active?” box to make this new profile show up in the drop-down menu, and make sure Rhythmbox isn’t open when you’re extracting, or else the results will be screwy.

FileZilla probably isn’t the best FTP available for Linux, but it’s one of the better free ones for Windows and I got used to it, hence its presence on this list. Shop around. Find what you like.

Pidgin is just a suggestion based on the state of Empathy at the moment—it doesn’t completely replicate all the features of Pidgin, so for now you might want to stick with the latter (unless all you do is chat, without any of the deeper functions of IM, such as file transfer).

Ubuntu Software Center

What used to be called Add/Remove Applications is now the Ubuntu Software Center. Here’s a screen shot:

It started off as Software Store, but some felt that name implied too heavily that the software offered was not free, which they felt ran counter to the FLOSS philosophy. So Mark Shuttleworth personally advocated the change from “Store” to “Center,” assuaging the cries of many. The idea is that, eventually, all package management (including duties currently handled by Synaptic) will be migrated to this tool. Further, though not planned for in the 9.10 release, eventually Canonical (the sponsor company of Ubuntu) would like to open the Center to developers offering for-pay applications.

This move has been met with much outcry, particularly from those who take the open source philosophy seriously. They fear that, ostensibly, the free (as in beer and liberty) aspect of software will disappear as more and more developers charge for their work. They feel this will erode the principles upon which FLOSS functions and eventually transform Ubuntu (and other Linux variants) into little more than cheap versions of proprietary OSs. On the other hand, others argue that a for-pay section will attract developers to the platform who would otherwise not consider it, including game and multimedia giants; having Linux ports of such software, they argue, will increase the adoption rate of Linux and its viability as a platform.

In any event, in actual usage I would say this system is a step back from the previous one. Instead of a dual-pane window (like Synaptic) wherein one can click on results and view information simultaneously, the browser-style navigation in Software Center replaces the results window with whatever you click on, meaning if it isn’t want you want or if you want to look at other choices, you have to go back a screen by hitting the rather unintuitive (and unchanging, regardless of search) “Get Free Software” button at the top left. I applaud the Ubuntu devs for attempting such a bold consolidation of functionality, but the arrangement bugs me. I liked the dual-pane style a lot better, even if each pane’s space was a bit small. That’s what scroll bars are for. I’m sure this will all get worked out in the end.

Stability and performance

Granted, I’m testing this on a fresh install and have been running it thus for about two days, so I haven’t exactly had much time invested in this system. On the other hand, I’ve been testing Karmic since Alpha 4 and, with the exception of a hideous train wreck at the end of Alpha 5 that left everybody’s systems borked, things have been remarkably smooth. I stayed installed and updated all through Alpha 6 with nary a serious problem. There were some minor issues, though. Totem is occasionally problematic, sometimes hanging at shutdown and requiring a Force Quit (I mentioned this above). I had a rather scary bout with Empathy (also mentioned) that forced a hard reset. One time I rebooted, only to find that Compiz wasn’t working and that it refused to be started manually (ironically, performance with Metacity sucked). A reboot allowed me to manually restart Compiz and all was well. Incidentally, as of the latest updates it’s doing this sporadically once every two reboots or so, though I’m always able to revive Compiz. Since Karmic Beta is merely a snapshot in time of the last few days of Alpha 6, the entire development cycle can be considered relevant to the assessment of the beta.

Applications (aside from Totem) have been remarkably stable. I can’t remember any application ever crashing or hanging the system, which is wonderful. Nautilus dropped a few times early on, but that was all the way back in Alpha 5. I’ve been conducting heavy file management, including that thing you’re not supposed to do (gksudo nautilus), and nothing has failed in ages. I feel like Karmic is incredibly resilient and robust, which makes me look back (not so) fondly upon 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, which caused me quite a few problems and eventually drove me to become a beta adopter for 8.04 Hardy Heron.

Performance-wise, Karmic feels pretty snappy. I’m using an Intel Core Duo 1.83 Ghz T2400-based machine, which is ancient by this time (it was new in early 2006), and most tasks feel very responsive. The Gnome menu, incidentally, can be sluggish to open sometimes, especially upon first booting up. Other than that, I’ve never felt as though I were waiting on my system when I shouldn’t be, which is far more than I can say about any version of Windows I’ve had installed (I beta-tested Windows 7 on here). Truth be told, Ubuntu has always felt great on this computer—Karmic continues that tradition.

Ist es Gemütlich?

The English language does not have an equivalent for the German word gemütlich, which is a shame because it’s the perfect word to describe the concept I’m trying to convey. Basically, this word refers to a sense of cosiness or comfort with one’s surroundings; if someplace is gemütlich it feels relaxing and not overbearing to the person experiencing it. This might be an odd way of evaluating an operating system, but to me it makes perfect sense. An OS is a lot more like a location in which I spend a lot of time than a bunch of 1s and 0s. So, after everything else, I can ask this question. The answer, as it has been since Hardy, is yes. Granted, I’ve been using Linux for a while so I know how to nest here, but Karmic honestly feels like a pair of old sneakers to me—comfortable and stable, yet still very capable. There have been a few missteps—this is a beta, after all—but overall once these bugs have been nailed, Karmic is going to be a phenomenal release.

Now that the CD playback issue seems to have been taken care of, my real qualms with Karmic are reduced to stuff like the bad dark theme appearance of OpenOffice.org, which can be forgiven, especially since the GTK+ 2 toolkit will be replaced by GTK+ 3 within the next year—this new framework is much more flexible than the current one, and many annoying little theming issues should be solved at this point.

Overall, I’ve said it enough times already: Karmic is shaping up to be a winner. There are some issues to iron out, but when that happens, Karmic will certainly be a force to be reckoned with and might just make a few converts out of long-time Windows and OS X users.