gnapse corner

I know, I know, I've been lost for a looooooooooooong while now, yes. It's a little bit more than seven months since my last post. What prompted me to write here again? Mainly I re-visited the whole site after the new version came out, just a couple of days ago. (And now that we're at it, I still do not know what the new features are).

It's not that I've been so busy that I was unable to post. I did have some time to post every now and then, although I've been busy. I've been working on interesing personal development projects, full of bleeding-edge technologies like AJAX. I've also been enjoying my new computing environment sooooo much you just can't imagine.

I am still on Ubuntu Linux Dapper 6.06 full-time, and I can't feel better at it. It is stable, friendly and enjoyable to the point that I have a hard time whenever I have to use that other OS that almost everybody use. I am developing web applications on Linux using jEdit as my main IDE. Aptana, of which I talked about in my last post coincidentally, turned out to be too resource-hungry, even though I have a modern PC with 512Mb RAM and 3.0GHz CPU speed. I've been using Firefox as my testing and debugging platform (Sorry Opera, but Firebug has no equal when it comes to test and debug a web application using JavaScript and AJAX heavily).

Thunderbird is still also my choice when it comes to email. Opera still does not have WYSIWYG email editor and other minor but handy features that I need. Opera continues to be my day-to-day browser for my web surfing needs, and OpenOffice, Gimp, ImageMagick, Beagle, Liferea, Gaim, Gnome, Vim/Cream, MPlayer and MPD do the rest. I've been also using Ruby's and Python's scripting power to automate some tasks in my working environment.

I've also been vey busy following the socio-political events that have happened in Cuba, my country, in the recent months, almost all related in some way to the illness of the president Fidel Castro and the temporary transfer of power, and how this has impacted our society. I know some people get more interested in this blog because of my nationality than for my interests and the topics I write about. Feel free to ask.

Anyway, I'll see if I can make the time to talk here again every now and then, mainly about the technologies I am using and how they make my life easier.

Well, the title makes it look like if the Windows operating system is evolving, and this is sort of it in a way. Windows has evolved a little bit now with Gnome's leading e-mail client Evolution being ported to this closed platform.

Yes, you heard it right. Evolution is now available on Windows thanks to somebody named Tor Lillqvist. So go and enjoy it. I believe Thunderbird will have to keep up, and Outlook (Express) too, of course. Do you think Evolution will be to the latter like Firefox has been to Internet Explorer? Only time can tell.

Is it Opera's fault or the CSS styling of the Ubuntu web site is non-standard? Have you noted that the tabs at the top right are unaligned when seen in Opera, but are ok seen from IE and Firefox?

From Opera



From Firefox



Update (July 2)

A good fellow member of this community, whose blog is devoted to Opera and web pages compatibility with this browser, tells me that...

this is a known bug and described as "floated list item children of inline list child of an absolutely positioned element are not displayed on one line".

...it is even considered quite important (probably mainly because of it appearing on the Ubuntu website)

So it is unfortunately a bug in Opera, and not a bug in Ubuntu's web site coding. I hope this bug will get fixed soon.

For the first time since I've been using Linux (for about 8 years now) I feel 100% comfortable with a distribution, and that is Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I've used Mandrake and Red Hat initially, and SuSE, Debian and the previous Ubuntu in more recent times.

I am a spoiled power user

I have to say that I consider my self a power user, not afraid of the CLI but very thankful of aiding graphical interfaces for some tasks. I prefer Gnome-Baker or K3b over cdrecord, for instance. But I also prefer to get my hands dirty with Perl to automate boring repetitive tasks, and I even enjoy reading man pages. I am no newbie Windows-like user, but I could use some visual aid.

Therefore Windows gets too stupid-proof for me, without even actually being stupid-proof in the end. Linux, on the other hand, was always a powerful tool. It always allowed you to go under the hood to see what was going on, and was also slowly creating an environment for those not willing to go there so often. But there was always something wrong. And I am talking beyond hardware support.

Broken expectations

In SuSE 10, for instance, USB sticks were automatically detected, but the unmount feature when right-clicking it showed some error stating that only root was allowed to do that. And this was the best experience I have always had with flash memory sticks in Linux.

Ubuntu to the rescue

I never really dumped Linux for these minor annoyances, but I always found my self needing Windows every once in a while. And I was never really able to fully convince my point-and-click relatives and friends that they were going to feel comfortable with Linux.

Ubuntu Breezy was like the promised land but it fell short of being it. The RootSudo thing (rightfully praised as wonderful and intuitive) never worked for me, don't ask me why. But the rest of it seemed tasty and I expected the next release with anxiety.

And waiting gave the expected results

Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS answered many questions and covered nearly every expectation I had. Everything worked seamlessly and I can even recommend it without having to bring myself to ease the installation process, because installation is the easiest and seamlessly I've ever tasted ever, not only with Linux. Who said Windows was an easy install?

Ubuntu starts as a Live CD, so you can taste it before you embrace it. Once on the desktop and you'll love it. Gnome 2.14 comes out shining from end to end. The Human theme makes XP's Luna and KDE's Plastik look like amateur.

The initial and reduced set of applications pre-installed is very well chosen and covers a great spectrum of most common tasks. Gimp for graphics manipulation; OpenOffice.org as the office suite; gedit for simple text editing; Rythmbox, Serpentine and the Sound Juicer on the media side, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution as the mail client, are all excellent choices.

And a simple icon on the Live CD desktop triggers the installation process. You may need to make room for Ubuntu in your hard drive, and this might be the hardest part, but not that hard. Gparted is also available at this stage so you can comfortably resize some windows partition graphically without loosing your data (although backing up some data is not a bad idea though). I expect them to incorporate the partitioning stage of installation into the wizard for the next Ubuntu release.

Up and running!


Once installed, the RootSudo thing work and the available set of applications is enormous, provided you enable the proper software repositories. The documentation in this respect is wonderful, so an in-depth coverage of the details here is not necessary.

(Here you have another great source of information about Dapper Drake.)

I just have to say that Ubuntu 6.06 is amazing and you should give it a try. In the true Linux and Debian spirit, Ubuntu is freely available (both as in beer and as in speech), downloadable directly from the web or obtainable by ordering free installation CDs.

It is absolutely incredible, but I've always needed a feature from Opera related to tabbed browsing. Wait, I know you would like to know so I'll tell you through the following (common) scenario.

I start browsing in the morning. I am eager to know about what's going on out there in the world so I go and get some news about the topics I'm interested in. I open Google Reader (my aggregator of choice), Google News and Yahoo News. A rapid glimpse through the immense amount of hyperlinked headlines generates a myriad of middle clicks to open in background tabs whatever seems interesting. Before I'm actually aware of it, I have twenty to thirty tabs in a single Opera window. I don't know you, but I don't like more than a dozen tabs together. Too much clutter.

What if I could move some of the tabs to a second (or even a third) window? Well, I realized today that I've always assumed this wasn't possible. I always looked for an option in the contextual menu you get when you right-click a tab, and I didn't find any. Don't ask me why (and you may call me a fool) but I thought today, what if I create another Opera window and drag some tabs into its tab bar? Voila! Eureka!

I haven't seen this feature in any other browser. Firefox didn't even have the plain and simple drag-and-drop of tabs within a single window until the latest 1.5 release (It had and extension, though).

It is amazing how Opera manages to give so many little but useful features out of the box. It is these little things that make this little browser so great. What? You want to know some other cool stuff?

• No need to restart to change the skin
  
• Session management
  
• The links and info panels
  
• The [extensible and customizable] search panel
  
• Custom panels
  
• Full customizability of toolbars layout
  
• The ability to recover tabs closed accidentally
  
• The "Fit to window width" button
  
• Small-screen rendering
  
• Zoom (instead of just changing the text size)
  
• The [magic] wand (there's just no other one like it)
  
• Voice
  
• Notes
  
• Fast-forward and rewind.
  
• You name it...
  

and if this is not enough, check out this wonderful collection of custom Opera buttons that are able to put any imaginable functionality just a click away.

Before I finish, I'd like to make a request. If you are familiar with any obscure and not-so-known ability of this mighty browser, and you happen to be reading this, please, let us all know about it.