Feisty Fawn
Even though my Linux guru, Sean, is offline for the next couple of days, I decided to risk upgrading my creaking Ubuntu install to Feisty Fawn (7.04). Went like a charm. The upgrade process was painless enough, and even though I'm hardly ever in Linux these days (should I dual-boot the laptop? hmm...), I remembered enough to manage where it wasn't entirely pain-free.While I was at it, I upgraded Firefox from 1.5 to the current release (Ubuntu wasn't nice enough to do that automagically, but I found a lovely script on their website to take care of it for me), installed IE6 in Wine per Sean's marvelous find, increased the screen resolution options (yeah, I remembered where xorg.conf is all by myself), installed upgraded versions of mysql5 and php5, set up a working copy of my CDFFL subversion repository, told apache where to find it, and verified that yes, I can do CDFFL development in Feisty.
Not so good, but much more amusing: attempting to install Silverlight into Firefox on Ubuntu. Not that I expected it to work, but the failure was so silent as to be amusing. Did it work? Did it not work? Who can tell, when all the links take you to the page you're already on? They're generated using javascript, but there's no "else" clause to handle cases where you're not a Windows or Mac user. Did Microsoft not expect someone running Firefox on Linux to try? Scooter calls it "the way of the web," but Scooter is notoriously (albeit non-maliciously) Microsoft-centric. Shouldn't "the way of the web" be available to open-source users? Or maybe Scooter meant that Microsoft's "the way of the web" is that all pages link only to themselves.
What I especially enjoyed about the Silverlight page, as rendered in Linux/Firefox, is the absurdity of it all. The page says that if I click "Install Now," I'm accepting the Silverlight licensing agreement. Okay, I can live with that (even though, as already noted, the link goes nowhere). But in Linux/Firefox, the javascript-generated links for "Detailed Installation Instructions" and "System Requirements" are identical to the one for "Install Now," which suggests that I'm accepting their license by asking whether I can even install or run the software.
So I'm accepting a license for software that I can't possibly run? That's some catch, that Catch-22. Maybe I should check out the terms of the license agreement I just accepted. There's a link to it -- and hey, this link actually goes to a different page! That's exciting. I'll click it. Oh, look. Empty window. Viewing the source shows why: another set of javascript ifs without anything to catch the unexpected. Apparently Microsoft can't afford the developer time to have someone write:
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Linux") != -1){
window.location = "your-free-os-sux!!1!.aspx";
}Oh, and yes, I thought about installing it in my nice new Wine/IE6 install, but thought better of it. Why risk it?
posted by MeanMrMustard @ 6:09 PM
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