What is a cynic?
Life
“A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde uttered those words, but more to the point Sidney Harris said “A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.” Let’s hope I’m not getting cynical; someone certainly thinks so.
Fedora Core 4 test2
Okay, this is from a rawhide snapshot of 3.91. There are some things that just don’t work the same, that seem to get somewhat annoying. Otherwise, everything seems to be a whole lot snappier on the laptop, in spite of lots of the kernel debug stuff still being turned on during test releases. I’m really happy about the speed improvements. Some notes…
- Upgrading from test1 to test2 and enjoy using OpenOffice.org? Don’t forget to sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/openoffice.org*/share/template/*/wizard/bitmap or there’ll be a little complaint during OOo’s installation. The GTK2+ file selector doesn’t seem to be available either, its the stock upstream version.
- Not having my windows pop-up is really annoying. C’mon, metacity, when I get a message from GAIM, I expect the window to pop-up, not just display in the Window List, minimised. That’s just wrong. It seems useful when I click on a website from Evolution to have Firefox appearing at the Window List minimised, because at least there I’m expecting something; its not the same with IM. Taking a screenshot in The GIMP of an application also exhibits this behaviour. For IM, I’ve resorted to using Buddy Pounces now for “important folk”.
- The Sticky Notes application used to be a joy to use. Configured it in such a way to click on it, would mean I see my notes (one-click), to right-click on it, would give me the option to add new notes (two-clicks). Now, to do either, I need two-clicks. Well, here’s more reason to clean them out (having ~29 stickies makes you unproductive) and think about getting something along the likes of Tomboy going.
- Evince is cool. My benchmark is the Firefox NYTimes ad, which gave me issues before (I had to install Acrobat5). I’ve now removed that, because Evince almost just works. Everything else I’ve given it, it seems to handle really well. Jumping thru links in PDFs make it all the more cooler. Why it isn’t the default PDF viewer in Firefox, I’ll never know – xpdf in comparison is rather ugly. (#154091)
Evince being a champ, wins the nytimes Firefox ad - The sound mixer in GNOME doesn’t represent doom anymore. Options are a lot simpler, and I think end-users will definitely appreciate them.
Nice, simple sound mixer in GNOME 2.10 - We need to start shipping gcjwebplugin. It simply makes the web browsing experience a lot more fun. However, with security implications, and lack of auditing, its still not in Core. (#127537)
- Informative post by Panu showing the tree differences between FC-3 and FC-4 test2. Lots of apps removed, but most generally sitting in Extras.
- The default GNOME Clearlooks theme is refreshingly nice. I’m glad Bluecurve has mostly gone.
- Xen is cool. I’ll have to write more about this later; only complaints and this is upstream anyways, is that when in xen0, CPU frequency scaling, and ACPI/APM stuff doesn’t work. And if you’re following the Fedora Xen Quickstart, which is an excellent guide might I add, right before running xm create -c rawhide, don’t forget to balloon down the memory for the host OS; this is because Xen now gives it all the physical memory, not saving anything for the guest OS. So it works out pretty simply such that you run: xm balloon 0 384. That gives 384MB of RAM to dom0, leaving space for the new guest. Also, initscripts doesn’t get installed in base, and that causes problems when making your chroot-based environment; do install it (or as Will Cohen/Ulrich Drepper points out in a post, rpm --noscripts --root /xen/base -vhi
/xen/base/var/cache/yum/development/packages/initscripts-8.05-1.i386.rpm)
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