Had a frustrating weekend Linux wise, mostly my own fault, due to incorrectly editing my repositories list prior to trying to apt-get dist-uprgade to Dapper I managed to toast my laptop. Fortunately I have my home directory on a separate partition so my info was safe but trying to reinstall fresh was a trial, the first CD I burned was bad and failed to install, after three attempts with this CD I bit the bullet and burned another one, this one installed and everything worked fine until I attempted a smart upgrade with synaptic, this involved a kernel upgrade which forced a reboot, after the reboot my wifi card wouldn't detect, nor would any other PCMCIA devices, weird. After some research I found a reference to this issue, apparently there was no known way to correct this once it had happen but it was possible to prevent it from happening by editing the blacklist to prevent installation of the patch that causes the problem. So reinstall again, edit blacklist, upgrade working, finally. This needs to be fixed before dappers final release. Now to get all the other stuff I need, Java (yes I know it's nonfree but I need it), free flash plugin (not as critical as java, if everything doesn't work exactly like macromedia flash I'll live), codecs (some of the podcasts I listen to are only available in mp3), last challenge is Realplayer (yes I know it's nonfree also but the BBC doesn't offer a free format, hopefully that will change soon) this one has me stumped it appears to require a lib that is not available in dapper at this time. I did some quick research and couldn't find an easy answer, I will try to reseach this further over the weekend hopefully I'll come up with something, there really needs to be something like Automatix, EasyUbuntu or Debcentral Config for Dapper and it needs to be available by the time the stable release comes out, there's no way someone new to Linux is going to figure this stuff out on their own.
One small victory today. a web developer friend at work asked me if knew of a good WYSIWYG html editor, NVU wasn't powerful enough and he can't afford the commercial stuff, I showed him Quanta and he was very impressed, he's trying it out tonight and promisses me a report when I see him next, since he's already Linux friendly I think we can chalk this up as one for the good guys.
One more great thing, heard back from Jono Bacon today it looks like my little slice of the web is going to be syndicate to the wider world via planet advocacy, and if that's not a great reason to blog more I don't know what is.