Took care of two computer jobs yesterday: A Vista tutorial and an OS X tutorial. I'm really glad I adopted Vista when I did and that my last regular job involved working alongside Macs, or else I would've been far less effecticve yesterday. Now then, if only people would start asking me to set up and show them around Linux :)
Speaking of which, I had my fun with Ubuntu 7.10 and was thinking of installing the latest 'daily' build of Debian, when I noticed that another open source operating system had recently released a new version. PC-BSD 1.4 was released on September 24th, and of the major updates (things like FreeBSD 6-STABLE, Xorg 7.2, KDE 3.5.7), three really helped to make the set up process much more enjoyable. Bundling Compiz-Fusion 0.5.2, support for Flash 7 in native BSD browsers, and official nVidia drivers (while controversial because of their immaturity, superficiality, and proprietary nature) goes a long way towards providing a complete and relatively painless desktop experience; that is what PC-BSD is going for, right? Really though, personally, I'm just glad to see OSS doing all the pretty things (right 'out of the box') that Apple and Microsoft are doing :)
I did, however, run into two bugs worth noting while setting up this new release. First, the same show-stopping issue between my SoundBlaster Live! and the bundled EMU10K1 driver that I had with 1.3 (freezing during start-up) still exists, but booting in safe mode and downloading the .pbi driver package from pcbsd.org still fixes that. Second, both of the bundled ATi drivers worked fine with my Radeon 8500 until I tried to enable Compiz Fusion. Using that window manager would cause all of the window borders to disappear (supposedly a driver bug, affecting only certain models), effectively negating all novelty of the fancy visual effects and killing a lot of interface functionality. Since I had no newer ATi-based video cards lying around, I swapped the 128MB Radeon out for a 64MB GeForce3 Ti200 and switched over to one of the bundled proprietary nVidia drivers (with the greatest of ease, I might add!), and all has been well and good since. In fact, I'm currently posting this from PC-BSD 1.4 using Opera 9.23... And I may just keep things this way for a while yet.
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