I tried out Ubuntu 9.04 a week ago. I know I’m not exactly comparing apples with apples, since MEPIS 8 is based on Debian 5.0 and uses KDE 3.5, whilst Ubuntu 9.04 uses GNOME 2. I might be better off evaluating Kubuntu, the 9.04 release uses KDE 4, which I’d used previously, and disliked due to its gradual reduction in snappiness. But back to Ubuntu versus MEPIS. I’ve been running MEPIS on a (slow) Compaq nc8230, while Ubuntu runs on a (fast) IBM R52.

With reference to this event, I’ve decided to take my own shot at predicting the outcome of the 2009 NBA Playoffs. 5 points are awarded for correctly picking the winner, with an additional 2 for correctly picking the number of games played. First Round (27) LAL-UTA (LAL in 5) (7 points, LAL won 4-1) DEN-NOH (NOH in 7) (0 points, DEN won 4-1) DAL-SAS (DAL in 6) (5 points, DAL won 4-1) HOU-POR (POR in 6) (0 points, HOU won 4-2) CLE-DET (CLE in 5) (5 points, CLE won 4-0) BOS-CHI (BOS in 6) (5 points, BOS won 4-3) ORL-PHI (ORL in 5) (5 points, ORL won 4-2) ATL-MIA (MIA in 6) (0 points, ATL won 4-3) I picked Miami (Dwayne Wade), New Orleans (Chris Paul), Portland (Brandon Roy) over the Hawks, Nuggets and Rockets respectively.

With reference to this post, I decided to write my first Greasemonkey script. I don’t subscribe to cable TV, so I get my sports news fix mostly by reading. Now that the NBA playoffs are in progress, I use NBA.com on a daily basis to read recaps like this one. I’m upset enough that the Lakers – one of the eight teams I’m rooting for – lost, without having to right-click “Game Scoreboard”, copy the link, and replace “gameinfo.

I found this link useful. It helped me to get Java running in Firefox. The instructions are a bit outdated, so I’m reposting. First we need Java: apt-get install sun-java6-plugin Go to the Firefox “plugins” folder, and rename for the existing (not working!) plugin with a .bak file extension (or whatever you prefer), then create a symlink like so: cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins mv libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so.bak ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so libjavaplugin.so You’ll also need to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

I received the following error in my CodeIgniter web application today: Notice: Use of undefined constant OCI_COMMIT_ON_SUCCESS - assumed ‘OCI_COMMIT_ON_SUCCESS’ in … It turns out that, on MEPIS at least, the packages bc, libaio, even having compiled support for OCI8. Adding those packages, restarting the web server and the error should go away.

Previously, I wrote that MEPIS worked (sound, wired networking, wireless networking) out of the box on my IBM R52. FYI, the wireless card is the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG. I’d also previously detailed instructions on Debian “Etch”. What I didn’t state was that I would encounter issues where wlassistant would complain about being unable to get an IP address whilst connected to a standard WEP SSID. However if it alone, it’d mysteriously work later on.