The instructions are very complicated. It says on the instructions "to enjoy all the features of this keyboard and mouse, you must install software". Not on Ubuntu Feisty, mate. plugged in and everything works as expected. No configuration required.

For anyone interested it's the Cordless Desktop EX 110. 

And I have to say, I've quite enjoyed the experience. E17 is a very well put together desktop environment. Things I love:

1. The amount of control you get over your windows (it can optionally remember which virtual desktop, size, postition, etc. you want an application in, as well as conveniently being able to start it at login and/or pin it to the desktop). Very nice, as Borat would say.
2. Low resource usage for nice bling - and not so much bling as polish really. Try it and you'll see what I mean. It's a good looking desktop, no doubt.
   
3. I like middle click on the desktop and you get a list of open windows. Switching to other windows is remarkably easy after a while.

Things I prefer about Gnome:

1. Transparency with compiz/beryl
2. Expose like feature of compiz/beryl
3. Integration of Gnome apps such as rhythmbox, etc. E17 still doesn't have a systray - I use trayer to get around it, but it's not ideal. It's a blight on an otherwise great desktop for E17.
4. Avant Window Navigator. Cover album integration is too nice.
   

I have to say, at this stage I'm not sure whether I'm going to stick with E17 or Gnome. Stay tuned....

Exaile is pretty much a drop in replacement for Amarok . I've always liked Amarok, particularly for the cover art, smart playlists and general music management, but I can't deny there's something unpleasant about running a native KDE app on Gnome. Exaile is written in Python, GTK-based, and has all the features and smoothness of Amarok - but for Gnome. Love it, love it, love it. Having tabbed playlists so you can have multiple open at the same time also seems like a big improvement on Amarok as well.

Instructions for install on Ubuntu here .

Edit [2007-02-21]: After some issues with Exaile not showing the album covers correctly and not being able to seek to a particular point in a Podcast, I'm currently trying out Listen instead. Will update in a few weeks based on how I get on...

Really made me think. Hard to get your head around, initially, but makes a lot of sense. Seems like with data-warehousing and such there's an implicit recognition that RDBMSes aren't always capable of addressing all storage needs. In that particular case, it seems like column stores instead of row stores have some dramatic advantages. 

Food for thought... 

I remember reading about some deployment of SUSE Linux that I think Nat or Miguel had talked about a few months back. The gist of what they were saying was that there were some big deployments coming, but they couldn't be announced yet. Well, maybe this was one of those, and now it's got to the stage that it can be announced.

Will be interesting to see what effect this has on the IT landscape if it goes through. One successful large-scale deployment like this would make other organizations/governments/educational institutions sit up and take notice. I'm pretty sure that if it's done well once, the floodgates will open. What works to the advantage of FOSS is that something like this would make such big news if it is a success that it would be known about everywhere (in the IT industry). This means that even though there may be other projects that are quite happy sticking with MS, and even if a project like this is, in global terms of usage, not even a small blip, it would have an impact much larger than it's statistical importance because it represents the possibility that any large organization could do this.

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
3. Enjoy!
   

There were two small gotchas. Because I was upgrading glibc I had to stop PostgreSQL first. And I had to change the apache startup script to remove the startssl option (deprecated). Other than that, all good.

Amazing how painless that was.

Now I have python 2.4 it's time to decorate !

Why, I hear you cry? Because I love the way the multimedia keys plugin integrates with Gnome so that I can simply define Play, Pause, Stop, Next Track and Previous Track within my Keyboard shortcuts, and then just use the Fn+<apt_key> as defined on my laptop's keyboard to skip away with all my music !!

Great. 

The first one was someone at work who had seen, from across our open plan office, my Beryl-enhanced desktop flipping round in 3D glory. He pulled me over and asked if he was in a different universe of if he'd just seen my screen moving without moving...

The other one was a Developer (Java developer on Windows) who'd asked for a copy of Linux to play around with. I'd made one for him and handed him the CD. He asked me if there was any license key... 

FInally got the GAL working correctly. Apparently our ldap server was different to the web frontend server. And all you need to put in the box where it says "Address of the server" is the address of the server. Yeah. Not ldap:// or /exchange. Just the address.

 Easy once you know how.