Tag Archives: Linux

Note to self: When grouping objects in the Webalizer config file please remember to Hide them too!

My first mail client was the old Netscape 4.x mail client. I used that for many years and was very happy with it.
I played around with Balsa, Evolution and other clients but I wasn’t happy with any of them.
Then I tried Kmail, the KDE mail client and I was blown away. It’s been my mail client of choice for the last year and a bit.
Out of curiosity I tried Thunderbird, the new Mozilla based mail client. It’s nice, it’s almost there for me except for:

1. When I click on a folder I want the newest message to be displayed. There is an option to “Remember last message seen” but it doesn’t seem to work as advertised all the time.
2. I like to delete messages by hitting “d”. My mouse is in my right hand and I don’t want to move it back to the keyboard to hit “Delete”.
3. When I’m reading a message I want to press cursor-down to scroll through the message. Pressing that key in Thunderbird goes on to the next message, the next folder, or it can scroll the message, depending on which pane of the window is selected. I should probably hit “n” to go on to the next unread message.

Thunderbird is good, it’s getting much better fast, but it’s got a bit to go yet.

Great! I didn’t know about lnxscene.org at all! They’ve lots of demo related news up there, and links to Linux demos. hmm. Must download!
Update! – of course, if you’re using an Nvidia graphics card you really should go to their site for their closed source drivers, or if you use Fedora Linux you should have a look here for rpms!
Go look for “Paper Rose of Texas” by Fit. Good 64k demo!

As seen on slashdot – a “run from CD” distribution from Mandrake has been announced.
What’s different about this one is that you can store your home directory on a memory of a USB dongle. I heard about this when I met the guys from MandrakeSoft a week and a bit ago.
Nice!

Well, I was in for a pleasant surprise when I tried to use a scanner at home last night!
Thank you Mel for the lend of the scanner, I plugged it into the usb port, navigated to the “Scanning Program” in the Graphics menu which fired up Xsane (the first time I’ve used it). It automatically detected the scanner and I had a preview within a few minutes. All without installing extra software, rebooting, fiddling, etc!
Next I went into the GIMP, as I remembered the “Acquire image” menu. That brought me back to Xsane, but after I scanned in the image it was “converted” into a GIMP image where I could dabble with it to my heart’s content!

Fedora Linux also comes with the Gnome Bluetooth Subsystem which did need a bit of fiddling around. From reading the above website I discovered the admin interface which let me scan for my phone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pair with my phone even though both asked me for PIN numbers. I’ll stick with it as it looks neat when I can bring up my phone in Nautilaus through the “bluetooth:///” interface! 🙂

Ironically prompted by my meeting with MandrakeSoft yesterday, I burned and installed Fedora last night and I’m mildly impressed with it. It looks much the same as RedHat 9, but it feels a lot faster. OpenOffice 1.1 loads a lot quicker, which could be down to some “pre-loading” mechanism I read about a few days ago. Unfortunately Nautilaus crashes more often but it is improved over the version shipped with RedHat 9. I tried KDE last night but I was half asleep so I don’t have any impression that it has improved in the months since the last release.
I noticed that xmms still doesn’t play mp3 files(for patent reasons), and you need to go get a plugin for it.
I downloaded the new version of apt too, and in the process of doing an “update” of that db right now.
Burning DVD+RW disks might be easier as the dvd+rw tools are shipped with Fedora (they’re simple to install anyway). Is there any GUI tool for burning that format? The only way I’ve burned a DVD so far is by using dvdrecord (command line tool) or a Windows app, and they were DVD-R disks.

I think I’ll take a look at Mandrake 9.2 during the week to compare!

I was invited to a breakfast meeting this morning with members of MandrakeSoft Ireland who are just now launching here! Along with Adam Beecher I met Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandrake Soft in France who had some interesting things to say about future products, ideas about their delivery mechanisms, business and Free Software philosophy.
I wish MandrakeSoft good luck in their expansion into Ireland, and hope we hear more from them in the Irish Linux Community!

I could have sworn there was a MaxDB MySQL already in the wild with extra options such as innoDB compiled in and such but Jeremy posted an announcement about the real thing a few days ago (yes, still catching up!)
Looks good – views, cursors, stored procedures, triggers.. I’ll hopefully have a play in the next few weeks. Triggers could certainly be useful for WP plugins!

This survey sounds really strange with “On a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being very well, how do you think Linux treats its employees?”
As others who replied to this mail commented, I suspect some strange statistics are going to come out of microsoft.ie in a few months time..