As noted in another post, X.org and XFree86 are basically identical code-wise. The only difference is that X.org has a more palatable license, which is why all the major distros switched over so quickly.
The other reason requires looking into the mysterious future... basically, politics at XFree86 were getting in the way of development, which was part of the reason for the fork; in 1 year's time, you can expect X.org to have a vibrant community of developers, with all funky new features in the X server, while XFree86 just sits and stagnates.
Well, I did a clean install of FC2, and I'm running X.org with no problems at all...
I just chose my proper keyboard in the keyboard prefs, and then went into the keyboard shortcut prefs, and pressed the keys and everything worked just fine (eg, bound "mute" to my mute button, and it came up as "XF86AudioMute"). The only key that didn't work was the "Log Off" button, unfortunately... but that's probably a side effect of me using the slightly wrong keyboard layout (for some reason, no program I've ever used has ever heard of the "Microsoft Natural MultiMedia Keyboard", I had to pick "Microsoft Wireless Multimedia Keyboard", which was closest in name (my keyboard isn't wireless).
I should look into writing my own keyboard layout file or something to get that log off key working. I know it works; back on FC1 I had to manually program all the extra keycodes to have the XF86* keysyms so that programs would even recognise them, then I bound commands to them all manually with gconf.
It's like all the crazies who go ballistic at people when people don't pronounce a hard "G" at the beginning of "Gnome". Why the fuck should they? It's pronounced differently in every other word beginning with "G-N".
Whenever I hear somebody pronounce it "Jnome", I smack them.;)
I tried setting it to "ctrl:nocaps" just to test it, and the caps key did nothing during the GDM login screen, but now that I've booted back into X, caps is acting as caps again. No ideas, anybody know what's going on?
If you're an Emacs user, having the capslock key mapped to control is the ONLY way to fly.
As a vi user, I admit that I have often found myself trying to type input into command mode and trying to enter commands in insert mode... I think I hate vi, but I'm just used to it and every time I try emacs I go away frustrated with all the wonky commands. I want to like emacs, but it's just not happening.
Just now, I tried the emacs tutorial, and by the time I had gotten down to the part explaining C-a/C-e/M-a/M-e, my pinky hurt from constantly having the control key held down while trying to press other keys.
So I tried that caps/control swap thing. I'm using Fedora 2 and the relavent section of my/etc/X11/xorg.conf looks like this:
Well, I'm currently using an ergonomic keyboard, and there's a big hunk of plastic above the space bar and inbetween the (T,G,B) and (Y,H,N) keys. It's not doing anything as it is, just wasted space... it'd be the perfect spot for a huge ESC key;)
(btw, I'm impressed that this hasn't turned into a huge vi/emacs flamewar;)
While I would say that going to another bank is a good idea, if your employer uses RBC it wouldn't have helped much.
I'm an ING Direct customer myself, and I'm still waiting for my paycheque.
Re:Firefox is OK, but...
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You have been tricked;)
Firefox (and thunderbird) still have the profile manager, but the default launching script has been rewritten with some trickery to hide it. That's right, when you "call the binary" and it opens a new window, that's actually an ugly shell script that detects whether or not firefox is currently running and then decides whether to actually launch firefox or just tell the existing firefox to open a new window based on that. It's a really ugly hack workaround for brokenness within firefox itself.
I know this because I wrote a similar shell script for this back in the day before firefox was bundled with distros and came with such a script by default.
Rest assured, if you were to download the official firefox tarball from mozilla.org, and tried to launch it twice, you'd get the profile manager.
It's not that firefox's profile manager has been removed, it's that lots of people have gone to great lengths to hide it at all costs... it's still there.
I personally use Galeon now, and I'm very happy with it. It's smaller and faster than firefox, has all the features I need, and doesn't have any of the big ugly warts:)
I don't know about the original poster, but I don't think the menus are a problem for me. It's the button toolbars that really bother me.
In your linked screenshot, look at the "Configure Desktop" window... that's a perfect example what I do like about KDE.. Plastik is very appealing, it's simple and not cluttered... but then look at all those Konq windows... what the hell are all those buttons? My current Galeon window has 8 buttons on the toolbar, and 3 of them I rarely ever use anyway... Konq's menus are just as bad, and other KDE apps are similarly terrible in that regard.
I agree, I find that KDE's Plastik theme is very appealing to my eyes, but the fact that most KDE apps have way too many buttons and menus and crap strewn all over the UI is extremely annoying. Konqueror, Kmail, and Kopete in particular are completely unusable. In fact, the only KDE apps that I actually prefer to their GNOME counterparts are k3b and digikam, but even then, the latest gtkam has risen to the "good enough" level where preserving widget toolkit purity becomes more important than the small relative advantages of using digikam.
Sometimes I feel that GNOME takes the simplicity to a painful extreme, though (epiphany -- the bookmarks aren't even heirarchical! Just a flat list of "categories" -- think heirarchical, but with a maximum 1 level of depth).
Besides that, I like the GTK2 appearance, especially with the bluecurve theme.
Re:what MS funded "study" about Linux isn't FUD?
on
Stallman vs Ken Brown
·
· Score: 1
Have you seen Revolution OS yet? RMS pronounces it "guh-NEW linnocks";)
(I love that movie BTW... I love when linus says "think of Stallman as the Great Philosopher, and I am the Engineer" -- I can just imagine stallman hearing that and grinding his teeth in frustration, it cracks me up;)
I'm not sure what you people are complaining about. I'm using FC2 right now, and I'm loving it.
GNOME 2.6 is great... the file selector is odd but I think it's an improvement over the old one, spatial nautilus is neato, and I didn't have any problems with the bootloader (though I don't have windows).
The combo of gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6 makes the system a lot faster than it was with versions 2.4 of those programs...
The problem is that when you buy windows and you get all that stuff bundled with it, all that stuff is made by microsoft. When you get a set of linux distro install CDs, it comes with 10 browsers, 20 mail clients, a few media players, 5 instant messaging clients, and a million other things. The problem isn't that nothing is bundled with linux, the problem is that EVERYTHING is bundled with linux. But that bundling isn't bad, because each program that gets bundled has it's own independant development community that is just a loose group of individuals, and isn't even commercial to begin with.
When you install linux, the hassle isn't because you have to go find stuff yourself, the hassle is because everything is given to you and you have to choose what you want to use.
The idea here is that when MS bundles MS's own media player into windows, you have no incentive to buy any other media players, so the media player market collapses because nobody ever uses anything but WMP anyway. When Mandrake bundles xine, that doesn't illegitimately control the market because a) you can easily remove xine, b) Mandrake doesn't get any benefit from you using xine or a competitor, and c) competing media players come with the system too, so nobody is being locked out.
Slashdot Mirror
As noted in another post, X.org and XFree86 are basically identical code-wise. The only difference is that X.org has a more palatable license, which is why all the major distros switched over so quickly.
The other reason requires looking into the mysterious future... basically, politics at XFree86 were getting in the way of development, which was part of the reason for the fork; in 1 year's time, you can expect X.org to have a vibrant community of developers, with all funky new features in the X server, while XFree86 just sits and stagnates.
Read up about the X.org server
Well, I did a clean install of FC2, and I'm running X.org with no problems at all...
I just chose my proper keyboard in the keyboard prefs, and then went into the keyboard shortcut prefs, and pressed the keys and everything worked just fine (eg, bound "mute" to my mute button, and it came up as "XF86AudioMute"). The only key that didn't work was the "Log Off" button, unfortunately... but that's probably a side effect of me using the slightly wrong keyboard layout (for some reason, no program I've ever used has ever heard of the "Microsoft Natural MultiMedia Keyboard", I had to pick "Microsoft Wireless Multimedia Keyboard", which was closest in name (my keyboard isn't wireless).
I should look into writing my own keyboard layout file or something to get that log off key working. I know it works; back on FC1 I had to manually program all the extra keycodes to have the XF86* keysyms so that programs would even recognise them, then I bound commands to them all manually with gconf.
It's like all the crazies who go ballistic at people when people don't pronounce a hard "G" at the beginning of "Gnome". Why the fuck should they? It's pronounced differently in every other word beginning with "G-N".
;)
Whenever I hear somebody pronounce it "Jnome", I smack them.
Really? Most of the engineers I know are asian... ;)
I pronounce it "aboot", not "a big shoe" ;)
There's a procedure where you can get tattoos removed...
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot gets Nasa'd!
In Soviet Russia, Nasa Slashdots YOU!
Ok, I'm done now.
~/.xmodmap:
It feels really weird hitting control and seeing caps lock turn on
I tried setting it to "ctrl:nocaps" just to test it, and the caps key did nothing during the GDM login screen, but now that I've booted back into X, caps is acting as caps again. No ideas, anybody know what's going on?
As a vi user, I admit that I have often found myself trying to type input into command mode and trying to enter commands in insert mode... I think I hate vi, but I'm just used to it and every time I try emacs I go away frustrated with all the wonky commands. I want to like emacs, but it's just not happening.
Just now, I tried the emacs tutorial, and by the time I had gotten down to the part explaining C-a/C-e/M-a/M-e, my pinky hurt from constantly having the control key held down while trying to press other keys.
So I tried that caps/control swap thing. I'm using Fedora 2 and the relavent section of my
What's wrong with this? I restarted X and caps is still caps, while control is still control.
Well, I'm currently using an ergonomic keyboard, and there's a big hunk of plastic above the space bar and inbetween the (T,G,B) and (Y,H,N) keys. It's not doing anything as it is, just wasted space... it'd be the perfect spot for a huge ESC key ;)
;)
(btw, I'm impressed that this hasn't turned into a huge vi/emacs flamewar
I've been using the same password for everything for so long that I don't even remember what it is, I just type it in by muslce memory. ;)
I'm waiting for fantast.iq or automat.iq or something... how about pan.iq? ;)
Seeing manhattan flooded with two stories of water and then seeing the statue of liberty up to her waist in SOLID ICE made the movie worth seeing... ;)
While I would say that going to another bank is a good idea, if your employer uses RBC it wouldn't have helped much.
I'm an ING Direct customer myself, and I'm still waiting for my paycheque.
You have been tricked ;)
:)
Firefox (and thunderbird) still have the profile manager, but the default launching script has been rewritten with some trickery to hide it. That's right, when you "call the binary" and it opens a new window, that's actually an ugly shell script that detects whether or not firefox is currently running and then decides whether to actually launch firefox or just tell the existing firefox to open a new window based on that. It's a really ugly hack workaround for brokenness within firefox itself.
I know this because I wrote a similar shell script for this back in the day before firefox was bundled with distros and came with such a script by default.
Rest assured, if you were to download the official firefox tarball from mozilla.org, and tried to launch it twice, you'd get the profile manager.
It's not that firefox's profile manager has been removed, it's that lots of people have gone to great lengths to hide it at all costs... it's still there.
I personally use Galeon now, and I'm very happy with it. It's smaller and faster than firefox, has all the features I need, and doesn't have any of the big ugly warts
I don't know about the original poster, but I don't think the menus are a problem for me. It's the button toolbars that really bother me.
In your linked screenshot, look at the "Configure Desktop" window... that's a perfect example what I do like about KDE.. Plastik is very appealing, it's simple and not cluttered... but then look at all those Konq windows... what the hell are all those buttons? My current Galeon window has 8 buttons on the toolbar, and 3 of them I rarely ever use anyway... Konq's menus are just as bad, and other KDE apps are similarly terrible in that regard.
I agree, I find that KDE's Plastik theme is very appealing to my eyes, but the fact that most KDE apps have way too many buttons and menus and crap strewn all over the UI is extremely annoying. Konqueror, Kmail, and Kopete in particular are completely unusable. In fact, the only KDE apps that I actually prefer to their GNOME counterparts are k3b and digikam, but even then, the latest gtkam has risen to the "good enough" level where preserving widget toolkit purity becomes more important than the small relative advantages of using digikam.
Sometimes I feel that GNOME takes the simplicity to a painful extreme, though (epiphany -- the bookmarks aren't even heirarchical! Just a flat list of "categories" -- think heirarchical, but with a maximum 1 level of depth).
Besides that, I like the GTK2 appearance, especially with the bluecurve theme.
we are going to get people gesticulating madly,
You keep your dirty gesticles to yourself!
Have you seen Revolution OS yet? RMS pronounces it "guh-NEW linnocks" ;)
;)
(I love that movie BTW... I love when linus says "think of Stallman as the Great Philosopher, and I am the Engineer" -- I can just imagine stallman hearing that and grinding his teeth in frustration, it cracks me up
I'm not sure what you people are complaining about. I'm using FC2 right now, and I'm loving it.
GNOME 2.6 is great... the file selector is odd but I think it's an improvement over the old one, spatial nautilus is neato, and I didn't have any problems with the bootloader (though I don't have windows).
The combo of gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6 makes the system a lot faster than it was with versions 2.4 of those programs...
Overall, I love it -- no problems here!
reference
I think you've got that totally backwards.
The problem is that when you buy windows and you get all that stuff bundled with it, all that stuff is made by microsoft. When you get a set of linux distro install CDs, it comes with 10 browsers, 20 mail clients, a few media players, 5 instant messaging clients, and a million other things. The problem isn't that nothing is bundled with linux, the problem is that EVERYTHING is bundled with linux. But that bundling isn't bad, because each program that gets bundled has it's own independant development community that is just a loose group of individuals, and isn't even commercial to begin with.
When you install linux, the hassle isn't because you have to go find stuff yourself, the hassle is because everything is given to you and you have to choose what you want to use.
The idea here is that when MS bundles MS's own media player into windows, you have no incentive to buy any other media players, so the media player market collapses because nobody ever uses anything but WMP anyway. When Mandrake bundles xine, that doesn't illegitimately control the market because a) you can easily remove xine, b) Mandrake doesn't get any benefit from you using xine or a competitor, and c) competing media players come with the system too, so nobody is being locked out.
Since then, IBM has been trying to figure out how to squelch the monster they created. However, do not kid yourself, IBM did create this monster.
Yeah, it's like IBM is Batman and Microsoft is The Joker or something.
Forget that shit, if you want speed, I'm sure you can find a dealer on a street corner somewhere.