Just finished my review of RSSOwl that I promised. It was a bit critcal – particularly of the interface, but at the moment it just doesn’t meet my needs. Still, I mentioned that, the cool features that are there and what I think the RSSOwl development team should do next.
The quest to find a better feed reader goes on, and I’ll look for my next candidate soon, which might this time be a web-based offering. Still using Google IG for now then…
Big news for all Linux users with Intel graphics chips who want to do 3D accelarated stuff like Xgl and 3D Linux games using open source drivers, because Intel have released the source code to their 3D drivers for their Intel 965 Express range.
Sounds good to me – but to be honest neither does it have a particularly profound effect for me because on this machine I’m running the binary Nvidia proprietary drivers (for my 6600 GT) and I don’t own/have access to a machine running Intel integrated graphics. Still, if anyone has any experiences with these drivers, leave a comment, I’d like to hear what people think of them.
The LXF Team Blog seems to reckon that Sun will officially open source Java in an open source briefing on the 15th, that’s next week. That really is great news – not that Java is somehow a better product open sourced, but opening it up will hopefully allow it to be packaged with most Linux distros and stop GCJ hell (I appreciate the work you do GCJ guys, but nothing beats the Sun JRE for compatibility). That’s presuming that the licence that Sun pick is compatible with the GPL and the big distro guys feel like packaging it as standard.
“On Tuesday 15 August 2006 Sun Microsystems invites you to an open source briefing. We welcome you to join Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer to hear the announcement firsthand.”
Java pre-installed by FC6? Sounds good to me. Should make trying RSSOwl out a lot easier anyway (watch this space for a potential review of said project soon).
Just came across this blog post, detailing some positive experiences with Ubuntu. Hey, apparently, even the wireless networking worked with zero configuration! Now that’s impressive, even for a commercial operating system.
So why not try Ubuntu today?
Slow, I know I am. But I’ve just run the Ubuntu Dapper Drake Live CD (well, actually the standard CD is the Live CD).
My first impressions are good. It boots pretty quickly for a live distro, and hardware compatibility on this machine was very good. The only thing Ubuntu couldn’t handle properly was my 19″ CRT, but nothing seems to manage that. It ran at 1280×1024@60Hz, which was a good resolution but a very poor refresh rate.
The Gnome desktop was slick and fast considering it was coming off a CD. Not my choice of desktop, but nevertheless, Gnome has come a very long way since I last used it seriously. The Gnome applications feel very slick and Ubuntu’s icon set particularly added to the polished feel.
The applications were up-to-date, the latest Gnome (2.14 if I’m right), Firefox 1.5.0.4 and a host of cool Gnome applications. Hankering to use my favourite KDE apps, however, I wasn’t too impressed with the fact that they run with a blue internal colour scheme, compared to Ubuntu’s standard orangey look. This is due to the lack of something like KDE’s GTK-QT-Engine which translates Gnome/GTK apps to look as if they’re running under KDE. Gnome could probably use this, but the problem isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, because there are more GTK-based apps than there are KDE/QT applications.
Anyway, that’s all for now, but I might well extend my Beginner’s Linux Tutorial series by running a quick tut on how to install Ubuntu off the Desktop (aka Live) CD.
In my second tutorial about Linux, I’m going to look at files and folders and how they work on Linux – because it’s very different compared to the Windows way of C:, D:, and E: etc.
Basically, in Linux (and other Unix-based systems, but I’ll keep it simple for now), there aren’t different drives. In Linux, everything you can access stems from the top folder in the stack. It’s called the root folder and it can be accessed using a single forward slash – /.
Apparently, anyway. Slashdot seem to have the story that the Linux NTFS project have released a beta version of their NTFS driver for Linux that should prove very useful for those (like me) running Windows + Linux dual-boots.
At the moment, using Fedora’s kmod-ntfs (available in the Livna repository), I can read my Windows NTFS partitions in Linux, but not write to them. The Linux NTFS project claim to have read/write support.
Now I would test this out, but it being a beta and my data being important, I won’t try it out until I’ve got a backup of everything done (I don’t know that it might not do something terrible to my data).
Anyway, good work and thanks to the Linux NTFS team.
I love the free VMware Server. It’s a great product, and thank you VMware for it. But the compulsory upgrading is irritating. Now I haven’t been using VMware lately, so I’ve been forced to upgrade twice, once for Linux and again for Windows. As you can see, nothing on the interface has changed:
VMware on WindowsHosted on ZooomrOK there’s probably bugfixes, but it’s not like it was particularly buggy before!
By the way, I hosted this image on Zoomr, because they’re offering free Pro accounts to any bloggers who host on Zoomr, check it out. They look a bit similar to Flickr, but officially they allow non-photo uploading (perfect for my screenshots!).
First things first, this is another post in the Explainer series. So, if you know what Linux and free/open source software are and/or don’t need refreshing, then you can just skip straight over this post.If you don’t know what Linux is, or have only vaguely heard of it, this post is designed to give you a brief introduction into what Linux is, what the ideas behind it are, and how to give it a try (without wiping over anything on your computer).
There’s no secret that I prefer KDE over Gnome on my Linux desktop (and I did use Gnome for some time, then decided to switch back).
But I still love Firefox – it’s by far got a better rendering engine than Konqueror (KHTML might be fast but rich-text editing and good rendering is important to me) and of course I can’t live without extensions!
But Firefox is written using GTK, the graphical application toolkit mainly used for Gnome, meaning it would look out of place on KDE. But for a little piece of software called the GTK-QT-Engine. It forces GTK to be rendered in QT (KDE’s native GUI toolkit).
This was perfect for most apps, but there was a small glitch with scrollbars on Firefox that was annoying (at the top there’d be one button that worked fine; at the bottom there’d be buttons for both up and down, but only the down button worked). Well, a routine Fedora update and there’s a new option to fix that in the KDE Control Centre. Good work, people.
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