Blog
Ubuntu 7.4 Feisty Fawn
I installed Feisty Fawn yesterday over my old Edgy installation, and I think I can honestly say that this is the best Linux distro that is out there. This is finally a product that doesn't leave me itching to create my own, just to show it should be done, and coming from me that says something.
While Edgy had several annoyances (boot splash was messed up, fglrx driver is a pain to install, xgl+beryl is a pain to install, safe grafics mode did not work as advertised etc.), I am happy to say that Feisty fixes all these issues, at least for me.
Installing the fglrx driver is a breeze with the new restricted drivers manager, although I still had to set the correct resolutions and horizontal sync frequencies in my xorg.conf. Compared with my previous installation those are really minor issues, even if newcomers may find them more troublesome.
The new network manager in the system tray, which among other things lets you pick a WLAN to connect to, is also quite cool. So is the disk-analyzer utility, which is both intuitive and fun to use. It could still be improved, but this is the first release as far as I know, so I won't complain about a lack of features here.
To summarize, Feisty really feels like a stable OS now, one that doesn't have several quirks that you need to work around. I really like the direction the ubuntu project is heading, and I take joy in being reassured that the people behind ubuntu are striving to create a quality product.
Photography online
Last sundays superbowl was a very nice event indeed, especially since the colts won the match. We did not only watch football however, we also ate some good food, and especially some good cake:
Since then I have been working on getting some of my better pictures online, as I am a passionate hobby photographer. The fundanemt default gallery module didn't suit my needs, so I needed to create my own PHP frontend code before I could display any of my pictures. The result is still quite crude, but as I don't have time in the weekend due to attending a ju-jitsu seminar in the weekend, I have decided to publish it as-is for now. I will obviously keep working on it until it works properly. Just click on the Photography link in the menu.
In case anyone is wondering, the icons were mostly taken from openclipart.org and some from Wikimedia Commons.
Generel Update
XglSnow is not dead. I was too busy during the entire christmas season to continue development of XglSnow, and in the beginning of january I got a bit hooked on Gothic3, in spite of its many flaws. After that I had two minor exams to take care of, and since then I have been busy visiting family, gaming and other things. I promise to continue development after this weekend, where we are going to watch the superbowl, and are busy preparing (and playing Warcraft3 a lot).
XglSnow 0.1 Released
Last Friday Brian Jørgensen provided me with a link that allowed me to finally install Xgl on my laptop, which I had previously been unable to do. After the first moments of coolness wore of, he suggested that we should create an xsnow like plugin for beryl, the compositing window manager, because xsnow itself doesn't work too well. Also, its winter now and it would just be so cool to do it. And now the results are finally available.
This first version hogs quite a lot of CPU cycles, as it has no restrictions on the maximum number of frames drawn per second, but that should be fixed in an upcoming version. So if you plan to do serious work, you're probably still better off without it, but otherwise it's just cool.
