The creme penguins were a nice touch!  Here’s last year’s cake.

Can’t have a BLUG party without Chuanr and Beer.

I decided on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.  (model number ST31000333AS)  Pricewatch is telling me it’s around US$125 for an OEM disk. That’s around 850 RMB.

I went to Bainauhui near Chaoyangmen Qiao, one of the big computer markets in the area.  Did some shopping around and they were essentially offering one for 790, and another for 890.  The difference I could tell was they offered a proper 5 year warranty for the 890, the other, 1 year.  She was speaking fast, so I probably missed more.  Any way, I bought the 5-year warranty.  Ripped off? Maybe.

I’m going to encrypt it with Truecrypt.  Can’t be too careful these days, eh?

Since I was there, I wound up buying a few more stuff, like a new mouse, more DVD-Rs, and a 4GB Micro-SD card for my OpenMoko.

All put together, I got a small discount, not crazy though.

I should have posted about this 2 weeks ago, but… As you see from the photo, Fred, Pockey, and I are sporting the brand new face masks brought to China by the BLUG’s very own Pollution Expert, Julien.

If you’re interested in getting one, check out his Website at http://www.pollution-china.com! (specifically here)

For the 3 or so weeks I’ve been using it, I have already noticed a great improvement in my breathing and less irritation in my lungs.

I (again) pasted what I wrote in the forums of the Beijing Linux Users Group:

A few observations:

1. Wow – Compiz rocks! Those who are allured by Mac’s “beautiful visuals”, they need to check Compiz out. I have no idea why the package compizconfig-settings-manager isn’t installed by default – took me a while to figure that out – I wanted the cube!!

2. The nvidia drivers were already installed. It just worked!!! This is a big improvement over 7.4. Yes, it complained it was a restricted driver, but that was easy to turn off by enabling it.

3. Getting the codecs to work, while straight forward, the connection to medibuntu sucks. So damn slow.

4. This is slightly related to 3. I like amarok to manage my music, so installing it was a piece of cake. But it didn’t recognize the xine engine untul I installed xine-ui. I didn’t see this in documentation anywhere (maybe it should be a prereq for amarok, or anything that uses xine)

5. I decided to go for the 4 partition approach: /boot, swap, /, and /home, where /home is by far the largest. I decided to screw the GParted route to try to resize, etc. I just backed up the data on my USB HD and copied things over once Ubuntu was installed.

Check my previous 7.4 installation post for a comparison report at http://www.beijinglug.org/en/index.php?option=com_joomlaboard&Itemid=25&func=view&id=811&catid=2

I still need to check the webcam support in the other clients to see if that has been improved.

Other than that, I really like how Ubuntu / Linux is coming along. I really don’t see a reason to spend the money to get Winblows or Mac. This is really a full fledged OS!

I documented my installation and configuration efforts at http://docs.cdrum.com/index.php?title=Ubuntu_7.10

Today, October 18, the new Ubuntu Linux should be out.

Here’s a screen shot of the header image of the main page.

So, where is it?! 0 days left, come on guys!

Perhaps they forgot Asia sees the 18th before the rest of the world?