CNN has an article about the new Batwoman comic super hero. To pace with the times, the DC artists decided to make the heroine a lesbian. Soon after, CNN posted a poll asking: “Should the sexual preferences of comic strip superheroes remain a secret?” As of right now, 55% of the participants voted “yes”, and this shows either how small minded some people can be or that these voters never read a comic in their life.

Remember, I don’t like having people discussing or making a big deal about their sexuality. I don’t care and I don’t need to know. But when it comes to comics, it’s a different story. A comic — especially the DC and Marvel comics — are *up close and personal* with the hero. Spiderman would never be the same if we didn’t know his back story and the two women of his life. Avengers would never be the same if Wanda wasn’t falling for the android Vision. Iron Man would never be the same if we didn’t know of his heart condition. And so on, and so on…

This time, the comic writers might have decided to jack it a bit up in terms of storyline, but nevertheless, a DC/Marvel comic is not worthwhile without the juicy stuff. It’s part of the product and part of the expectations. It always was.

Shits out on “mounting root filesystem” (spitting out hdd I/O errors, while the CD-RW device is just fine and the burned CD also). Apparently it’s a known bug, nevertheless, a showstopper and without a workaround. I am dissapointed ‘cause I heard good things about this version and wanted to try its ACPI support.

Update: What a f*cking piece of shit this is? So, the installer went through only after removing the “quiet splash –” from the default kernel line. After installing and rebooting, it would force on me 1600×1200 at 60 Hz (which is not the recommended resolution for this LG 19″ CRT). So, I use Gnome’s screen res utility to tell it to go to 1280×1024 (and that utility would insist that my monitor can do that resolution only at 86 Hz, while it can do it at 85 Hz in reality — I thought, nothing to worry about, as this might just be a rounding error in their calculation). Instead of going at that requested resolution though, it just reused the same resolution under VESA. Reloading the Gnome screen res utility to go back to either 75Hz or SXGA won’t do anything, Ubuntu now seems to be stuck in VESA and in that 1600×1200 resolution at 60Hz in particular. So, I have no other option but to manually edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to simply change the driver from “vesa” to “savage”. This is the right driver for my graphics card and it’s being working fine with it since forever and ever. Hah, good luck with Ubuntu 6.06! When using the “savage” driver it says that “no screens found” and X11 doesn’t load (yes, the module exists in /usr/lib/xorg/drivers/). It only works with Vesa now and it won’t accept anything else anymore! I see no other option but to re-install, or get the f*cking CD and slam it out of the window towards Australia.

And don’t let me start that their new installer didn’t even ask me WHERE I want Grub to get installed (on MBR or on the / partition). It overwrote my MBR without asking me, and not only that, but it doesn’t recognize my BeOS and FreeBSD partitions as bootable and so these OSes are not included anymore in the booting menu. Anaconda does this elegantly without confusing the newbies and without removing this important feature from the power users.

Indeed, I got what I paid for. The reason why I get so worked up is because of all the Linux weenies who won’t stop saying how great the Desktop Linux is. It isn’t. It SUCKS, no matter what distro you use. With Windows or OSX you have to wait a week to find 1-2 small bugs with intense usage, but with Linux you are eating them on your face right out from the installer already. Poorly tested, poorly documented, and even poorly written in some places. Obviously, Linux is not what I am looking for in my desktop. I have higher standards that what it can offer me today.

Update 2: My sound card doesn’t work (and it’s one of the most supported sound cards out there). lspci does nothing. The ubuntu “application add/remove” utility spits errors. And I also showcase how Ubuntu thinks that it runs on 86Hz while it runs on 60Hz VESA. All that in 30 minutes of usage. This thing doesn’t pass smoke testing.

Update 3: The X and sound problems went away after adding to the GRUB the following kernel parameters: noacpi acpi=off. The rest of the issues remain. It is funny that I decided to try out Ubuntu because of its supposedly good ACPI support, and at the end I had to completely disable ACPI just to make the basic functions work. I guess, Ubuntu is good when it actually works.

To JBQ: Congratulations my love!
To my readers: JBQ just got promoted to a manager (from ’software architect’).
This calls for a champagne.