December, 2005:

The “GentleNews Radio Show”:http://gentlenews.com/theshow/ will be airing tonight, just like every Tuesday night, at 8:31pm CST. Tune in, email in, and call in. Whatever you do, be there. If your lucky, you’ll hear from Gladys again.

Send email to theshow [AT] gentlenews [DOT] com before or during the show to express your support or show off your naked breasts. The first chick to call me “Howard”:http://gentlenews.com/archives/2005/12/06/here-we-go-again/ gets a photograph of my weener in their Inbox — no shit.

By “suggestion from friends”:http://revjim.dreamhosters.com/articles/2005/11/30/what-linux-is-lacking and with promises of “everything just works” I decided to replace my 4 year old (though continuously upgraded) Debian installation with Ubuntu Breezy. This is my review from the standpoint of a Debian user.

First and foremost, you lied. All of you. Sound does not “Just Work” in Ubuntu. Well… it does, but, only as much as it did for me with Debian. All of the applications do *not* automatically just work together in harmony.

You don’t believe me? Okay… try this. First, start beep-media-player. In case you’ve tweaked yours ever, you may want to double check your output plugin. The default setting is “OSS” which is where mine is set now. You should set yours there too. Now, play an MP3. It doesn’t matter which. Got it? Okay. Now… do *anything else* that involves playing sound. Pull up audacity. Load the Gnome Sound Recorder. *Anything*. It won’t work. Now, stop your MP3 from playing and your other application of choice has no problem. Now, let’s say that you choose the Gnome Sound Recorder as your other application. Well, that would be a mistake. When you rin it, it fires up the eSound daemon and, with it running, beep-media-player won’t play music anymore. Fun isn’t it? Don’t worry. Wait about 30 seconds and eSound will time out and release the sound card again, and then beep-media-player will start functioning again. I’m sure there is some magical set of settings, and drivers, and audio subsystems that I could link together to make everything work, and I’m sure that same forumla would have worked in Debian as well. The point is, it doesn’t “Just Work”, so fuck you.

Now that I’ve gone through all of this trouble, I’m no closer to perfection on that front than I was before and that was really the “big problem” that Ubuntu was going to fix. The other issues I raised with Linux weren’t going to be fixed by an Ubuntu installation.

What else did I get with my Ubuntu installation? Well, Firefox 1.5 doesn’t come with Ubuntu Breezy. On top of that, the “Breezy backport” of it requires that I uninstall an entire host of other packages (including OpenOffice) in order for it to go into place.

Of course, without Firefox 1.5, that means that GreaseMonkey is really slow and not all of my old scripts work. Spellbound (my spell checker of choice) doesn’t want to install into Firefox either so, forgive the mispellings plesae.

My Nautilus version is older and uglier than I had before. I don’t know which version I was on or which version I have now, but I can tell this is older because it feels like my desktop used to feel before I upgraded many, many times ago. I don’t seem to have a gVim icon in my menu any more even though I know it’s installed.

There are a few good things. The installer was easier than the last time I installed Debian. I still had to run the installer three times because I didn’t understand that it was allowing me to make a really silly mistake when it came to LVM setup that made the machine not boot after the install was finished.

There’s a pretty, graphical splashscreen that displays when Linux starts up too. That’s nice to look at. I don’t really reboot all that often but, now, when I do, I’ll be all excited about it. I had a graphical boot up screen before, but, this one is prettier.

All in all, it just feels like an older, although more stable version of Debian. I don’t have things that work now that didn’t work before. Compared to where I was, the only benefit I can see is that it made me backup my data and clean our my home directory.

If you’re just starting with Linux, or you’ve come from something that isn’t “apt” enabled I’m sure Ubuntu will be a very welcome upgrade. The software seems stable and is easy to use (relative to other Linux software). But, it’s not the miracle everyone says it is. If anyone tells you that upgrading from Debian to Ubuntu is worth the trouble. Or maybe these people just don’t know how to tweak Debian as well I do. But, I don’t see any improvement at all. In fact, I’m just about ready to switch back so I can have Firefox 1.5 and my gVim icon back.

Who invented standard printed photograph sizes? I’d like to know so I can personally kick them in the balls.

Just so you can feel my pain, let me do the math for you.

* A 4×6 print has an image ratio of 1:1.5.
* A 5×7 print has an image ratio of 1:1.4.
* A 8×10 print has an image ratio of 1:1.25.
* A 11×14 print has an image ratio of 1:1.27.
* A 16×20 print has an image ratio of 1:1.25
* A 35mm negative has, roughly, an image ratio of 1:1.5
* My dSLR camera has an image ratio of 1:1.5.
* Some point and shoot digital cameras have an image ratio of 1:1.33.

This means that, just to print a single image at 5 different standard sizes you’ll need 4 different croppings, all of which will differ depending on what kind of camera you used. That’s insanity.

It wouldn’t be a big deal if I wasn’t considering selling my prints matted. When you don’t need a mat, what I do — and what a lot of other people do — is print with borders. The borders easily adjust to make up for the slight differences in cropping. This way, the image remains true to its original ratio and nothing is lost or cut off due to image sizes with different ratios. When the print purchaser goes to frame the image, they simply need a custom matboard (about $15) to properly house the print. However, because I want to sell my prints matted, I have to purchase matboard to fit each individual print size. I can’t possibly keep all these different matboard sizes in stock and most bulk ordering places want me to purchase at least 10 of each size that I order. The costs add up quite quickly.

So, as I see it, there are, really, six options:

# Trim my own prints and cut my own matboard. That’s a whole lotta work and takes a whole lotta time.
# Keep 4 different matboard sizes in stock, always frame at the 1:1.5 ratio and only use conforming print sizes (4×6, 6×9, 8×12, 12×18, etc). That’s a bit limiting. The 1:1.5 ratio is my favorite, but, 1:1 and 1:1.25 also have advantages in certain circumstances. Plus, these print sizes are not so common and are more difficult to find frames and pre-cut matboards for.
# Keep 243 different matboard sizes in stock allowing me to mat 3 different aspect ratios (the ones I use, 1:1.5, 1:1.25, 1:1) into the 5 common frame sizes. That’s a lot of matboard sizes to have in stock. The initial investment would be terrible.
# Keep 12 different matboard sizes in stock allowing me to mat 3 different aspect ratios (the ones I use, 1:1.5, 1:1.25, 1:1) into 4 different abnormal sizes per ratio (a small, a medium, a large, and an extra large). The abnormal sizes could be quite difficult to find frames for off the shelf. So, if they aren’t ordered from me, it will be a bit costly at a custom framing shop.
# Have a custom matboard cut special for each print. This will increase the cost to the customer and the time for delivery.
# Crop the image to fit whatever size has been ordered and try not to notice how much better it looked the original way.

So, which do you recommend? I’m leaning toward option 4, myself.