Simulation Sickness

As a Linux user I am always interested in what's hot in the area of distribution releases. Usually I use Ubuntu, but as 9.10 messed with me I today was tempted to try out Fedora 12. So, after an initial backup of my data I jumped right into installing Fedora 12 from the DVD image

I mean Fedora is a really nice distribution and everything (I like the concept of "only free software") who always have the neatest new features up their sleeve, but it just can't compare to ubuntu. Here's why:

• No 3D on NVIDIA: I have an NVIDIA card (7600gt) so I get either KMS (which makes a nice boot and so on) with Nuveau _or_ 3D with the proprietary driver. But here's the catch: Fedora doesn't have a "find me the right driver" utility as ubuntu has, so getting the proprietary driver to work means basically digging through the net and a bunch of console work. And then you have to figure out how to get your 3D working in x86 apps like wine -.-
  
• It looks ugly: the default theme is ... really bad to mouth it nicely. The spacing of the panel icons is way too wide and the font rendering looks somehow weird to me. Also the icons look kind of weird (too colorful?)
  
• yum seems not to have autocomplete: apt-get has autocomplete for package names and the like, but yum does not -> hard to find stuff and also typing long package names sucks.
  
• the package manager: synaptic is so much easier to use imo.
  
• the /boot-partition: okay, this is for using grub and an LVM, but it's 2009 and we have grub2 which can boot from an LVM, even the not-so-keen-to-try-too-much-new distribution ubuntu switched to that in 9.10 - why is fedora still sticking to grub legacy?
  

K, now my usb-stick is flashed with ubuntu 9.10 which will once more reign over my computer. I hope I didn't step on anybodies toes, but I mean what I said and I hope if someone stumbles over this it is not taken offensive but as a incentive to make things better.

Cheers,
Serious

PS: once I am back on ubuntu I'll write about the good stuff of Fedora (that I will miss by then) during the installation

Jup, you read that right. I, the great Opera fanboy (k, we all know there is no better browser around) am slowly getting annoyed of the way the development of opera goes. Here's a list:

1. Long-standing issues and simple improvements don't get implemented although they would really much contribute to a better overall usability (like [Ctrl]+[Tab] also when only 1 tab is left, Please restore the star in the address bar (hell, it was allready there), Opera and authenticating with a Chip-card, and so on)
   
2. Instead new features (widgets, unite) get implemented where a different solution - and a good solution that is - allready exists (like XAMPP, imo damn simple to use). Note that for these features also other long-standing wishes would be an improvement (like "closing opera to tray" and so on - see My 2 Cents on Opera's Widgets)
   
3. Skin issues: There is still no qt4 skin for linux x64 - or gtk would be even more appreciated. Oh, and guess who does not care about my font settings for the UI that are est in qtconfig?
   
4. Fx-Style shortcuts: damn, Ctrl+N for a new tab was great and I don't get it why this had to change. Also Ctrl-N means (in normal hotkey-terms) "new document" and not "new window". As I wrote in a comment on the 100-papercuts-series (great initiative imho) it should be sthg like:
   
5. Ctrl + N = new Document: look up user prefs if he/she wants to use tabs or not (which in apps that use tabs should default to "yes")
   
6. Ctrl + T = Allways open new tab (overriding user prefs)
   
7. Ctrl + Shift + N = Allways open new window (as shift points to the next-higher structure: document -> window)
   

K, I think I'm done with my friday-morning-rant (hey, I should make a series ). In short what I want is something like the 100-papercuts that ubuntu currently does for opera so all those small, long-standing bugs finally get some attention and (hopefully) get fixed). I am sure that such an initiative could also work with closed-source apps like opera, as there have been a number of community-driven stuff in the past (like "Ask John"). If this selection process gets merged with a tracker for these bugs (nothing big, just a table with bug description & status) we are golden.


Edit: Way, the desktop team just released their first qt4 build on x64. And I it.

So I just watched the 2005 movie War of the Worlds. I had that idea after getting myself a copy of the War of the Worlds play from Welles (yep, the one that caused a little hysteria), which I really liked. You can imagine how disappoinged I was by what filth Spielberg had produced.

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So, ph030 released his new version of opdf (0.3 and 0.3.1). This in turn made me fire up my ... gedit ... and do some more coding on my side (based on 0.3, but merged in 0.3.1 changes afterwards). the result is 0.3.2 with three major changes:

1) fixed some really sh**y js bug (let's just say that I didn't really get how onerror worked )
2) the first page now loads automatically when it's rendered - I'm thinking about changing this a little: keep the loading-indicator until every page is loaded and then replace it with the first one if no other page was currently called (maybe tomorrow)
3) re-merged the js-files and added a global variable for the layout mode (can be useful anyway)
4) used pdf2svg's internal loop instead of our external one again

I have a known issue though (but I don't know if it's my own stupidity or opera's): Sometimes the first page yields a parsing error as pdf2svg seems to not fully have written the file to hd. This can be worked around by simply pressing reload. This won't stop the parsing, so don't worry I haven't currently figured out why opera is too stubborn to call the onerror function but simply displays an error page (or why pdf2svg writes half-finished files for that matter) though ... well, maybe tomorrow when I'm a little more awake

cheers
Immanuel aka. Serious

opdf_032.tar.gz

As I allready mentioned this blog is not only about opera but also my studies. One course this year is called Multi-Agent-Simulation and deals with just that. Yesterday I had my end-of-term presentation and everything went well so now I will present my project to you, dear reader.

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