admin's blog

It looks like the Mint devs have been listening to its users and those disgruntled with other distros. They will be using Gnome 3 in mint 12 but with an added layer customizing the desktop to a more traditional feel and use. This makes sense, no point in clinging to the Gnome 2 branch at the risk of apps going stale, but it avoids the radical change that many users where faced with at the switch from Gnome 2 to 3. This allows for a more gradual transition and not the immediate iphone tablet eye-candy style GUI that suddenly appeared in distros like Fedora 15. I know Fedora are cutting edge but they must have realised the stir such a radical change would cause.

From the Mint site :-

If you update the ATI drivers in Linux via the binary package from AMD or from a repo, the ATI control panel (amdcccle) may show the older previous catalyst version.

This is because information about version is stored in /etc/ati/amdpcsdb and does not get updated when you update the drivers. Solution  is to delete this file from a terminal as root then reboot. Nest time you run amdcccle it should show the correct version installed.

Looks like Virgin Media are up to its old tricks again. They are now traffic managing Usenet and p2p traffic from around 5pm onwards regardless if you have downloaded anything or not that day. My 20Mbps line speed using Newshosting servers drops from 2000kbps to around 350kbps. Changing ports makes no difference and the speed starts very low at 50kbps and builds slowly to the capped limit. They monitor layer 7 for the protocol.

I am not an heavy user so rarely hit my allowance anyway, but being traffic managed on Usenet from 0 bytes use seems to be taking it a bit far. Why not traffic manage the top 5% heavy users ? Better still, stop over selling and aggressive selling to new customers with big discounts while treating long term customers paying full price with contempt.