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There is a certain thing about skinning. It's just relaxing. Changing skins, browsing for skins, adding icons, trying out different color schemes in order to find the best match. The skinning community is quite large, ranging from people who change only their WinAmp skin, to people who use different DE's on Unix-like systems. In fact, you are also skinning when you don't use a DE; since the command line is in fact a type of 'skin' as well.
Given the number of reviews floating around detailing people's first experiences with every Linux distro under the sun, I thought it might be entertaining to take a light-hearted look at my early experiences with my first Mac.
While many of our team members are hard at work, coding and working on updating their team pages and adding all of the official site content, there are some other things that need to be done. We are going to need some Newbie Help Files and some "Developer Tutorials to be written in order to fill some large blank spots on our new site. I posted more information
in our forums. If you would like to help out with either of these, please see either the
Newbie Help Files thread or the
Developer Tutorials thread."
I have to admit that I am an Opera fan; I started using it when a friend of mine came with version 6.0 and installed it to me. My first impression was not very good because the screen was crowded with toolbars, icons and things. But I spent a few minutes examining each one and removing all; I like the screen clean, not filled with toolbars and things that waste screen space, after all, 1024 x 768 is not enough.
On
this report I will detail some Mac OS X Tiger WWDC build (8A162) new features that will be illustrated with many screenshots. I will try to focus on features other sites did not report yet.
Gnome 2.6's recent switch from navigational to spatial mode within Nautilus was highly controversial. As probably most of you know, "navigational" means browsing through folders in the same window, just like it works in Windows 2000/XP or in Konqueror. "Spatial", on the other hand, is a very different concept of managing your files. Not only does each folder open in its own window, but the windows also memorize their exact position and size on the desktop.
Virtual memory is one of the most important subsystems of any modern operating system. Virtual memory is deeply intertwined with user processes, protection between processes and protection of the kernel from user processes, efficient shared memory, communication with IO (DMA, etc.), paging, swapping, and countless other systems. Understanding the VM subsystem greatly helps understanding how all other parts of the kernel work and interact. Because of this "
Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager" is a great guide in better understanding and working with the entire kernel.
Sun finally released a preview of
Project Looking Glass.
Sources are of course included, and it's GPL-ed. Project Looking Glass is/should_be a revolutionary new aproach to the way we interact with the applications, the biggest change to GUI in 20 years. I wonder if 21" is enough, cause having 20 windows folded like the ones in the
screen-shots should be a bit troublesome at 'only' 1600x1200.
Let me make it clear. I'm not a fan of Apple. I think that their products are overhyped, overpriced and underperforming. If you're looking for a fair unbiased opinion, you're looking in the wrong place. You've been warned. So, I was at Steve Jobs' 2004 WWDC keynote yesterday, attempting to take pictures for OSNews (an amazingly hard task, by the way, which really explained why people pay big bucks for big lenses equipped with image stabilizers).
UPDATE: Stop reading right there, I have
rewritten & updated the article here.
I've been using Fedora Core 1 (FC1) for a few months now and have been quite happy with it. It is a good distribution with a minimal number of bugs (if any) that have caused me problems. Of course, it took some tweaking to get it just right, but I can accept that for the price.
Microsoft
will sell a version of Windows for high-performance computing--a niche in which rival Linux is blossoming--with a first version planned for the second half of 2005.
As a developer there was one language that I could not stand programming to. That would be the Java language. One of the things I have always liked about Windows XP and even Mac OS X are the visual IDE tools that are available. They make designing the interface easy and really hassle free. Even the QT toolkit and GTK offer interface builders. I must say I am a bigger fan of .NET and Mono. The Java language offered Swing and even then it remained a hassle.
The battle about Software Patents in Europe seemed as good as lost. The Council of Ministers voted for a directive that basically slapped the European Parliament in the face because they shamelessly put aside a democratic decision taken by the European Parliament. And even though the Parliament still has a second reading where it will have to go trough a lot of trouble to repair the damage done by the Council, it is a serious matter that the Council of Ministers seems to have no idea how sloppy their directive is. It does allow general, broad softwarepatents, practically without restrictions even though several explanations by the Ministers say they don't.
A friend of mine wrote to me and asked me how he could go about switching to Linux*. I sent him an email back with some suggestions about how to approach it and he suggested that I should share this with others, so here it goes.
Six months ago, I decided that the GNOME desktop was ready for exclusive use on my desktop computer. Having used GNOME daily since that time, I have come to appreciate the thought and attention to detail that makes GNOME so friendly and usable. I have written
a brief article that describes my experience with GNOME and that provides a brief introduction to GNOME for those who have yet to try it out for themselves.
There are times when a directory needs watched. For reasons of its own, a program may need to know when a file is deleted, updated or renamed. If .NET is involved, this is a trivial task. Create an instance of the FileSystemWatcher; set some properties, and the task is completed. If a non .NET solution is required (and regardless of the hype, some people haven’t embraced .NET in all of its glory.), the ReadDirectoryChangesW function must be used, however the documentation for ReadDirectoryChangesW is sketchy at best.
There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.
There already exists a good deal of reviews of Mandrake 10 already. Instead of doing the typical review, I'm going to do things a bit differently. You see, there are a few things my OS needs to do perfectly, to warrant it a chance to stay on my PC longer than an hour or so. If any one of these necesseties fail, I may end up not liking the OS altogether. My OS needs to support good hardware acceleration, it must be able to play MP3's, I absolutely need Zsnes, and it has to be fast and stable.
Recently, I got my hands on version 0.2 of
Cobind, a Linux lite desktop, based on Red Hat/Fedora Core 1, from a software company in Pittsburgh. Not yet in general release, Cobind is a one disc wonder.
The recently announced GNOME 2.6 has finally brought many features long awaited by the Linux desktop fans. GNOME 2.6 is all about ease of use, performance and unification and while it's unfortunately hard to say that the GNOME desktop feels fast, it certainly began to be really easy to use and it has consistent look and feel — and that consistency is what makes up for most of the quality of a graphical user environment. UPDATE: Scroll down the article to read some added commentary.
