Linux

As there was only very limited internet access at Fosdem, I didn't find the time to blog live, so here my collected impressions.

Keynote with Richard Stallman about software patents. I already knew this talk, so it wasn't so interesting. I also think there weren't much people in the room that had to be persuaded to resist software patents, so they should have probably choosen a more »visionary« topic for RMS to talk about. After that an interesting talk about the GPL v3 (also by RMS). I asked a question about the problem that GPL v2 only code can't be mixed with GPL v3 code, he asked me to email discuss this with him, what I will do.

There were two talks about Xgl, one from Matthias Hopf telling what xgl is, what problems they face and some compiz presentation (with the always-known whooo-effect). Zack Rusin did a »Why Xgl is not the answer« talk. Was very interesting to hear the pros and cons of Xgl, I don't have a real opinion on that (I don't feel that I understand the technical details enough), but we should probably have an eye on the different futures X has (Xgl and aiglx at the moment).

Another very interesting talk in the X room: Stephane Marchesin is working on reverse-engineering nvidia chipsets and intends to write a free driver for them. It's in a very early stage (basically at the moment just finding out how the chips work), let's wish him all success (see nouveau - his not yet working first sources).

Suse gave out free (as in beer) t-shirts, so don't be amazed if you see me with a suse t-shirt running around ;-)

Some other more or less interesting talks, overall the presentations are the highlights of fosdem, you'll probably hardly find another event with so many interesting, high level talks about open source and free software.

Pictures will be here as soon as I find time to upload them.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers' European MeetingFOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting, will start on saturday. The schedules sound quite interesting.
Tomorrow I'll start my trip to Brussels and hopefully will also find some time to visit the city.

Maybe I'll have a small presentation of the xgl-overlay. If you are also there, this is the chance to meet me in reality and probably exchange some pgp-keys or such.

Okay: If you regularly read my blog, you know that I'm a linux addict and free software fan. I really like my linux, I'm much more comfortable with it than the bad old days when I used this other system from this redmond company. I have the strong belief that free software is the better concept and will succeed on the long run. Just to make clear that this is a very rare situation when I rant about linux.

So let's start: Today I wanted to print some slides from a university lecture. They were landscape format and to save paper (52 pages), I wanted to print four of them on one page. A simple task one should think.

Started kpdf, clicked on print. As my cups was configured, I could select my printer, go to it's options and found a 4 pages on 1 option, so it seemed fine. Clicked on Print. Waited. Waited. Nothing happened.
Webbrowser, localhost:631, no printing jobs. No errors. Nothing.

Looked at the logfile (this is at least the point where every common user wouldn't come further). Nothing that helped, just a note to change loglevel to debug. Did that. Restarted cups. Re-sent page. Logfile showed up some segfault in a gs-command. Damn, why can't just the interface tell me that?
From the small knowledge I have about linux-printing, I knew that there are various implementations of ghostscript. Looked into portage, found three, replaced ghostscript-esp with ghostscript-afpl. Restarted cups.

Tried to print, my printer actually did something. Well, it looked interesting. I had the third page in the upper left corner and about a third of the fourth page beside it. Beside that, far smaller than it should be, nearly unreadable.

Ok, there are some other pdf-viewers out there. Tried kghostview. Print, select 4 pages option, etc. Printer started doing something.
The result was really interesting: The pages were printed white on white.

Next try, evince. As evince is a pretty new gnome-tool, it sticks to the gnome guidelines: Less config-dialogs, less features. It just had no possibility to print four pages on one. Oh, should I mention that evince crashed when I wanted to close the printing dialog?
Gave up. Will read it on the screen.

Conclusion: Free software had some great success in the last years. Today we have systems that can compete to commercial ones in many areas for common usage. Some areas on the other side are really horrible. Printing is one of them.
If we really want to compete on the desktop, we need to get such basic tasks to »just work«.

The greatest music player of all time, called amaroK, just had the first beta release of the upcoming version 1.4.
The most visible new feature is the so-called moodbar that tries to color the »mood« of a track. Okay, it does a hell of cpu-usage and I doubt it's very useful, but it looks really funky.

Gentooers: emerge sync, add media-sound/amarok to your package.unmask, add use-flag exscalibar, enjoy!

This blog got lot's of visits recently, probably because of the interest in my xgl overlay.

I've now created a new one based on the latest code changes in mesa and xgl, together with the new opengl window- and compositemanager compiz.

I'm releasing it although it's not really working for me at the moment.
I can run Xgl with compiz on my Radeon 9200 card with the free xorg driver, but have redraw-problems, so I don't know if the effects work at the moment. If you made better experiences, please post them here (I'm especially interested if it works better with other cards, e. g. nvidia ones).

Short Howto:

• Download latest xgl-overlay-xxxx.tar.bz2, unpack it, point PORTDIR_OVERLAY to it
• emerge mesa glitz xgl compiz
• Run Xgl :1 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv:pbuffer (ati) or Xgl :1 -ac -accel glx:pbuffer -accel xv (nvidia)
• Run DISPLAY=:1 compiz decoration, DISPLAY=:1 gnome-window-decorator and DISPLAY=:1 xterm (or something else)

There are some infos on the openSUSE webpage, especially about various driver problems, I assume I'm one of the »With some drivers screen refreshs do not work properly«.

If you just wanna see how it looks, here is the Novell announcement with some videos.

As you've probably read, Microsoft has released a first public preview of the Internet Explorer 7 a few days ago.
As I've been interested in webdesign for quite a long time, I was often worried that you couldn't use a bunch of possibilities in modern HTML code, because the nearly monopoly browser doesn't support them. Microsoft has not done any development on the IE for several years. When Firefox started to endanger the market share of the IE, they decided to change their mind.

Now I had the chance to have a first look at the IE7 on a friends laptop. I won't comment on the interface improvements, cause I wouldn't seriously suggest anyone to use this browser. I'm only interested from a webdesigners perspective, because I know that despite of all the buzz about Firefox, still a lot of people use the »default« on their system without thinking about it and probably will continue to do so.

I held a bunch of html/css test-cases for a while with examples I faced due to my webdesign work and found out that they don't work in some browsers.
A quick note: IE7 will behave completely as crappy as before if your docs have a HTML 4 doctype declaration. So to check the new css features, define XHTML 1.1 in your doctype and IE7 will use a »strict-mode« to render your pages.
The features I was missing most in the past are finally implemented: Transparent PNGs, fixed-positioned objects and defining objects through their left and right distance.
Beside that, there are still a bunch of features missing, min-height, max-height, empty-cells, just to name some. In my test-cases, it couldn't compete with any other browser, although they may be not representative. If you have suggestions for enhancements to the test-cases, feel free to mail me or post them.
My blog looks quite okay, some minor bug with the top black line, maybe I'll investigate this further (well, maybe not, maybe you just shouldn't use IE to watch this page ;-) ). Acid2 looks crappy as before.

So as a conclusion, IE7 has fixed the most grave issues, but is far away from fully implementing CSS2. If the free browsers want to enlarge their ledge over IE, I'm still waiting for the first browser to call CSS2-complete.
I hope this can be a chance to come a step forward in webdesign. For the future, the CSS3 previews looks very promising, I hope it won't take as many years as CSS2 till browser developers will take care about it.