csant/log

Google is running, among its experiments, a keyboard friendly Google search.

Key     Action
J       Selects the next result.
K       Selects the previous result.
O       Opens the selected result.
<Enter> Opens the selected result.
/       Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>   Removes the cursor from the search box.

A really sweet feature - just too bad you cannot configure your own key bindings…

Edit: Ohh, jorunnix, thanks for pointing it out: just add &esrch=BetaShortcuts at the end of the GET URL for your Google search

Right - we have "UNIX" builds for desktop Opera.

And even though it isn't a really correct label for this family of builds, it means builds for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, for the Intel, the PowerPC and the Sparc architecture, for 32-bit and for 64-bit architectures, each one in several builds, and each build in several packages. In short: a jungle.

Additionally, there have been some new builds in Kestrel Alpha 1.

So which exactly is the package you need to fetch? This depends on the operating system, the OS version, the architecture, etc. Let me provide you with a short summary on which build is exactly what.


Linux
intel-linux

• .1 static - qt3 static build, gcc 2.95
  
• .5 shared - qt3 shared build, gcc 3
  
• .6 shared - qt3 shared build, gcc 4
  
• .9 static - qt4 static build, gcc 4
  

There is an experimental .10 build at the moment, which is a qt3 static build, gcc 4.

ppc-linux

• .1 static - qt3 static build, gcc 2.95
  
• .3 shared - qt3 shared build, gcc 3
  
• .6 shared - qt3 shared build, gcc 4
  

sparc-linux

• .1 static - qt3 static build, gcc 2.95
  
• .2 shared - qt3 shared build, gcc 2.95
  

x86_64-linux

• .2 shared - qt3 shared build, gcc 4
  

FreeBSD
intel-freebsd

• .1 static - qt3 static build, FreeBSD 4
  
• .5 static - qt3 static build, FreeBSD 5
  
• .3 shared - qt3 shared build, FreeBSD 5
  
• .4 shared - qt3 shared build, FreeBSD 6
  
• .7 shared - qt3 shared build, FreeBSD 7
  

amd64-freebsd

• .1 shared - qt3 shared build, FreeBSD 6
  

Solaris
intel-solaris

• .1 static - qt3 static build, Solaris 10
  

sparc-solaris

• .1 static - qt3 static build, Solaris 8
  
• .2 shared - qt3 shared build, Solaris 8
  

Note that the Solaris 8 builds will also work on higher versions of Solaris.


So what?

On Linux there is the additional complication to understand which build you'll need for which version of your distro. It would be far too long to give a full overview on that, but here are some hints for some major distros:

You'll need the Linux .6 build for:

• Debian Etch, Sid and Lenny
  
• Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty
  
• Fedora Core 5, 6 and 7
  
• openSUSE 10.x
  
• Slackware 11.0 and 12.0
  

You'll need the Linux .5 build for:

• Debian Sarge
  
• Linspire 5.0 and 5.1
  
• Skolelinux 2.0
  
• Xandros
  

I'll assume that FreeBSD and Solaris users are smart enough to figure out which builds they need for their OS version

HtH

In 1984 Richard Stallman started work on GNU Emacs, which was to become the first program released by the newly-born GNU project in 1985: work on a free Emacs to replace the commercially available ones was more urgent than to start working on the basis of the new system, a kernel. (The new system has, incidentally, still no kernel…).

Version 13 was the first public release: versions 1 through 12 never really existed - actually, the numbering scheme would require us to prepend an implicit "1.": after version 1.12 the authors realised they would never increase the major version number and reduced the version scheme to <minor>.<patch>.

Version 15.34, released in May 1985, was the first widely used version. This however sparked a heated controversy on some code copyrighted by James Gosling for the (by then commercial) Gosmacs, or Gosling Emacs - the first significant software copyright controversy, which led to the release of version 16.56 without Gosling's code in July 1985, and contributed to the creation of the GPL. More details in an interesting paper [PDF].

Version 18.47 from 1987 became the basis for a new project, originally (1987) called "Nihongo Emacs", or NEmacs, later to become Mule, the "Multilingual Enhancements to Emacs" in 1993 - handling not only Japanese, but an impressive amount of other character sets, coding sets, input methods and languages. Main Mule facilities (except for BiDi) were included in the main GNU Emacs as MULE, starting with version 20.1 (1997).

In 1991, while waiting for version 19 to be released (19.28 was the first official release, in 1994), Jamie Zawinski at Lucid Inc. forked off Lucid Emacs, later to be renamed to XEmacs: they urgently needed to ship Emacs (with the features new to version 19) to support their Energize C++ IDE. Both Emacs and XEmacs developers have expressed their views on the lasting schism: one of the main disagreements being the copyright assignment issue. However, most features developed in one of the editors soon appear in the other one as well, and several features are developed to equally work in both.

Version 21.1, released in 2001, was the first version that could display inline images - and promptly Emacs got its own logo and displayed it in its splash screen. Additional features include support for proportional fonts, a better GUI with toolbars and support for mouse, and some Unicode support.

And now, more than two years after the last update (triggered by a security fix) and almost six years after the first release for version 21, version 22.1 got released - or shouldn't we really rather say: version 1.22.1?

Emacs now comes with:

• a new set of icons,
• a new GTK+ GUI (specify --with-x-toolkit=gtk when building),
• Leim (the Library of Emacs Input Methods), the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, the CUA mode and many more as part of the distribution,
• a graphical interface for GDB,
• Python mode,
• a few nice new command line options (-D or --basic-display is how my emacs has always been running),
• the infamous C-M-delete and C-M-backspace have been removed (since there are situations where one or the other will shut down the operating system or your X server - took them exactly how long to remove this?), and
• a few neat new bindings have been added (such as C-x left and C-x right to switch buffers) and some changes were made to C-h bindings,
• enhanced utf-8/16 coding systems and support for iso-10646-1 (Unicode) fonts,
• support for Mac OS X,
• some incompatible editing changes,
• support for drag'n'drop,
• mouse support in xterm (M-x xterm-mouse-mode), and
• loads of more NEWS…

It's also worth giving a look at the guided tour which provides an excellent overview on the most used features.

But the really exciting work is yet to come: next steps towards version 23 will be merging the unicode and multi-tty patches!

I have chosen rPath Linux:

rPath Linux is designed to be a stable, high-quality, relatively "vanilla" distribution that closely tracks upstream stable packages and is easy to make a derivative distribution from

• Binary and source packages are available;
  
• Vanilla packages, thus unpatched (did I mention that I hate distros patching their packages?);
  
• rPath is one of the fastest at updating packages in its repository;
  
• Conary (the package management system, or rather the "distributed software management system") promises to be extremely flexible.
  

That seems to fulfill my primary requirements. So far installation went extremely smoothly on my laptop - will keep you updated on progress.

A short comment to the suggestions:

• Ubuntu or Kubuntu (or any other *buntu) as well as any other Debian (based) distro are far too heavily patched, and so is Gentoo - I really am not interested in patched distros.
  
• Slackware might be somewhat better in that respect, but there I miss the bleeding edge.
  
• Arch is a distro I have been having in mind as an option, and for a long time I was undecided between Arch and rPath, until I finally decided for the latter, for now - but Arch is still a distro that looks interesting and its development is worth being followed.
  
• If I'd be to move away from Linux, I'd rather switch to Plan 9 than to other UNIX systems.
  

A campaign to market a late-night TV cartoon causes what exactly in a totally screwed up state in constant paranoia mode, that smells terrorism in about anything?

a security alert that closed bridges and roads. […]

The small electronic sign-boards were placed near roads and under bridges over the Charles River, prompting suspicion from commuters.

Police destroyed the first package they found to see if it contained explosives. […]

Police have arrested Peter Berdovsky, 27 - the man hired to place the electronic smiley-faces - on the relatively new charge of placing a hoax device.