Please tell me that the new GUI package manager is an early alpha, and that the dreadful performance, almost-invisible feedback, downright misleading “install security updates?” dialog box, and reduced functionality is a temporary aberration.

With that minor gripe out of the way, I just need to build the EEE wireless and ACPI packages on a VMware session, grab the updated RPMs that fix Japanese text entry, and then reinstall with a slightly-less-insane package selection, but out of the box, F9 has decent sound, video, and wired ethernet support for the EEE. I found it fairly easy to switch to a full Sun Java install, which got our Juniper VPN software working.

As a side note, while playing around with the new install, I finally confirmed that the furigana and vertical-text-layout features in OpenOffice interoperate with MS Word correctly; the UI is completely different, but it sucks in both, so that’s not necessarily a criticism. Given what an ugly hack furigana is in Word to begin with, I’d say one of the OO developers earned his lunch money on that one.

[this is mostly a theoretical issue for me, since a Word license costs me less than lunch at McDonalds, but it’s nice to know that people for whom Word costs a few burgers can get by for free]

[Update: to clarify a bit on one of the above points, when I turned on my EEE this morning, F9 popped up a dialog informing me that three important security updates were available. Unfortunately, clicking the “Update computer now” button silently installs eight updates, and I can’t even get a list of them without closing the dialog, clicking on the star-bang icon at the top of the screen, selecting “show updates”, and then selecting “review”. In addition to the security updates, it also updates libvorbis, the UpnP SDK, PPP, some Japanese bitmap fonts, and the OS release notes. Bad design.]

[Update: the pop-up window doesn’t have a scrollbar, either, so when I booted up a small-screen machine that had 21 security updates, I couldn’t even see the buttons.]

We’re used to getting our laptops back in… “worn” condition. Usually just cosmetic wear and loose display hinges, but some of them get dropped or otherwise abused (our CEO apparently uses his MacBook Pro to stop bullets), and a few have been completely trashed.

The one we recently got back from our copy-writer when she left the company (“Hi, Sue!”) was special.

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After making my latest Amazon order (no, not the boy’s shoes they recommended because I rated a Microsoft mouse, or even the Bourne Ultimatum DVD they recommended because I bought a book on Tokyo (although, to be fair, I did see that movie dubbed into Japanese…)), an HP ad popped up that included a statement that seemed surprisingly honest:

Ink-cartridge technology must be pretty bad when you’re proud that only one in a hundred are no good.

This is the Asus EEE PC slogan localized for Japan: “manabu hataraku asobu”, which copies half of the English slogan, leaving out the whole “easy” part. Then again, it ships with Windows XP instead of a dumbed-down Xandros derivative, which might make it less approachable for a complete novice, but definitely more familiar to the Windows-centric Japanese audience.

Now that there’s a working Fedora 8 distribution for the EEE (thanks to the new official kernel support and Philip Pemberton’s RPMs), I can really start using mine. The supplied Xandros-derivative was amusing, but much too limited. Among other things, WPA2 Enterprise wireless was messy to set up, the Juniper VPN software simply didn’t work, and I really, really like chkconfig.

The most important software I’ll use on it? Claws Mail, Perl, emacs, minicom, Firefox, and StarDict. StarDict isn’t as useful a Japanese dictionary as Jedict for the Mac, but at least it uses the same source data. I’d prefer the “Green Goddess” dictionary that’s being included in some of the recent handhelds, but the EEE is small enough for most occasions, and I’ve already got a WordTank and a DS Lite running Kanji sonomama.

Why on Earth are you shipping a brand-new, business-class laptop with a 14-inch 1024x768 display?!?!?

Your DigitalMedia SE software is installed on one of our Windows laptops (Sony ships the damn thing, in fact). It’s supposed to help users burn DVDs. When I pushed the little button to burn a disc containing 3+ GB of data scattered across several thousand files, a little dialog box popped up complaining that 6 of the files couldn’t be written.

This was in a fixed-width window, and the files were listed with their full pathnames, cut off at the end of a non-resizable column. I have no idea which 6 files can’t be burned to the DVD, and your software refuses to tell me. Obviously no one at your company has ever actually used your product.

Yesterday, a user’s VAIO BX640 dropped dead in the middle of a meeting. It didn’t come back, and by that I mean “nothing happens when you press the power button”. After swapping in different battery and power supply, I called for service.

This afternoon, another user reported that he wasn’t getting sound out of his BX640, and the headphone jack just made ticking noises. It doesn’t even make the magical VAIO noise when you power it on. I swapped parts around, reset the BIOS, etc. No luck. This isn’t a critical issue, so I’ll wait until Monday to ship it off for service, but it’s disturbing, because they’re both motherboard problems. And so was the only other one of my (more than a dozen) BX640s to fail so far, several months ago…

I’m playing with my old Sony XG-19 again. As reported earlier, OpenBSD 4.1 worked but never played DVDs, Fedora 7 blew chunks during the install, and Debian 4.0 worked fine, requiring only a few xorg.conf tweaks and a copy of libdvdcss2.

But it sucked for Japanese, so it had to go. There are all sorts of input managers and applications available, but they don’t all play nice with each other, and the system setup assumes that anyone who wants to type in Japanese wants a completely localized system. You can work around this, eventually, but I lost patience.

So I tried CentOS 5. The graphical install worked fine, the xorg.conf file only needed a one-line change to shut off double-tapping on the trackpad, and once you find DAG, it’s easy to get DVDs playing with VLC (Totem steadfastly refuses to admit which of its plugins are missing, and nothing I install seems to placate it, but who cares?).

The Japanese support in CentOS is much more mature, and offers a user experience reasonably close to Mac OS X or Windows. The default keybindings are naturally different from anything you’ve ever used before, but one has to make some concessions when dealing with Open Source, and it has a “behave like Windows” option.

Now to build the current version of Claws Mail…

[Update: got Claws 2.10 built and running, and unlike my Debian install, it plays nice with the Japanese input method.]