I really don’t know what else to say besides what the title says. Ubuntu repos have Firefox 3.0 and the Budgetdedicated repos (from winehq’s site) has Wine 1.0 for Hardy.
Sure, I’m not really a big fan of Firefox 3, but if you like it, grab it. I’ll continue to use SeaMonkey 2.0 alpha myself…
If you’ve ever kept a blog for a long period of time, you’ve probably gone back and re-read your old posts and were quite embarrassed by them. Many things you said you no longer believe, or have changed your mind on, or something. You rant about things that really didn’t matter in the long run, and you generally wonder what state of mind you had to be in to write that.
Well, I have gone back and re-read all my posts, but I’m not going to change or remove any of the core things I said, even though I now disagree with a few of them (Amarok, I’m very sorry I was so harsh to you!). However, I was distressed by my use of harsh language in many posts, and decided to edit a few of my posts to remove the harsh and vulgar language. The tone of the edited posts was not changed at all, just my choice of words to express my feelings. Getting mad at something does not mean one has to drop F-bombs, you know.
So I feel better by having a generally cleaner blog now, and hopefully it will not scare people off as it did before with its occasionally scary language. I apologize for using such language on this blog, and I will not use any more scary language here in the future.
In case you have missed it, the Wine project (an effort to implement a Windows-compatible application layer under other operating systems) has been marching toward a 1.0 release lately, currently (as of this writing) at 1.0 Release Candidate 4 (1.0-rc4). They have been working on fixing most of the major bugs in many applications so that Linux (and other open OSes such as *BSD) can run Windows programs on their desktops without having to deal with emulation/virtual machine-type software that would slow execution down significantly. Wine even runs many major Windows games such as Steam engine games (Half-Life 2, Portal, Counter-Strike Source), World of Warcraft, the Grand Theft Auto series of games, and many others with minimal or no extra tweaking, as well as programs like Photoshop, the Microsoft Office suite, and many others. (Compatibility reports can be found on their AppDB page.)
Even though I would like for developers to port these applications to Linux so that we may run them natively instead of using a program that, admittedly, will never gain 100% compatibility with Windows due to Microsoft’s desire to keep the internals of their OS closed off and therefore unable to completely duplicate successfully, the tireless work of the Wine developers have made it possible to have the next best thing, and I thank them for their efforts.
Ubuntu 8.04 has been installed, and I’m pretty much committed to it. Everything seems to be working fully with no issues at all.
My refuge where I was considering abandoning Ubuntu was Arch Linux, but a bug with X regarding stuck and repeating keys has not seen a fix there, and it kept biting me hard, especially during games — enough where I had to do something quite drastic, like, say, install Ubuntu.
So no worries now. Everything looks cheery and rosy again, and many of the issues and fears I had with Ubuntu 8.04 have melted away and I’m successfully using it again. Though I did have to install the Firefox-2 package, since the 3 beta kept thrashing the disk, getting terribly slow, and giving me all kinds of headaches. I would stick with SeaMonkey, but dealing with the plugin issue where one has to install as root every time there’s an update gets a little tiring. I am hoping this issue will be resolved in SeaMonkey soon (by all reports, it will), but meanwhile, I can deal with Firefox Version 2 Point SomethingOrTheOther quite nicely.
Today, the new Ubuntu version Hardy Heron was released…
and I find myself not really caring.
You see, a little while back, I discovered Arch Linux, a much lighter and faster version of Linux. It takes a little more to install and maintain than Ubuntu, but damn, it’s fast, it doesn’t have tons of stuff running in the background (unless you want it to), and it’s generally much better than Ubuntu for me. Even the package system has a lot of packages to choose from (unlike Slackware, which is why I abandoned it) — not as many as Ubuntu, but close enough.
I’m downloading the new Ubuntu CD right this moment, but I’m wondering if it would really be worth the time and effort to use Ubuntu again? I do still have Ubuntu installed on this machine (the 8.04 beta), but my original plan was to reinstall Ubuntu from the final 8.04 release to see how it goes. I might not be doing that now.
So yeah, I’m considering dropping Ubuntu. I still recommend its use if you’re new to Linux, but for me and anyone else that has a lot of Linux experience, I just think Ubuntu looks less and less attractive now with every release.
I, the undersigned, wish to make it clear that I deplore the methods and means used by Microsoft to push through a wholly broken and closed format through to the DIS 29500 standardization (OOXML). I believe standards should only be carried out when said standard is something that promotes interoperability, openness, and a desire to give something to society as a whole rather than use standardization as a way to strike back at a former approved standard (ODF) so that they can claim standardization on something that is nowhere near a real standard. We are not “strongly disagreeing” with a certain party, only with their manipulative methods used to push through a broken “standard” that is impossible to fully implement due to proprietary metadata information contained within a loosely, incompletely defined so-called “standard”.
I call on everyone that cares about true standardization and interoperability between platforms to support this view, and to continue to attack the ISO “standards” body that has been deceived by Microsoft to support and pass this ill-conceived and broken “standard.”
-Stephen D. Cofer
As a fan of emulation and Linux, I’m happy to see that Nintendo 64 emulation has progressed a bit. Mupen64 has been pretty much our only N64 emulator for a while, but progress has been slow, and the emulation was still a bit off the mark.
Happily, some people have been working on Mupen64 and there’s now an updated version called Mupen64Plus. Performance and graphical capabilities are now very much on par with the excellent emulator Project64 available on Windows. Many games ran at full speed without any graphical glitches with no tweaking necessary, something I found myself having to do a lot in the old Mupen64.
Installation is pretty simple: run make all. You’ll need a few development (-dev packages on many distros) dependencies here and there, including “yasm”. You’ll then need to edit install.sh, changing the “INSTALL” line to INSTALL=install (instead of “ginstall”). Then run sudo make install or su -c ‘make install’ for non-sudo systems.
Enjoy!
Back in the olden days where we were trying to flee from the tyranny of Microsoft’s bug-filled Internet Explorer, we found refuge in the resurrected ashes of our old friend Netscape, resurrected as the new Mozilla Suite. But sadly, things weren’t all good — even though Mozilla was much more trustworthy, stable, and most importantly, open-source, it was a huge, bloated browser that took up way too much memory and too many resources to be really useful. Mozilla decided to fix this by stripping away all of the bloat and extra features that weighed Mozilla down, and created a new browser named Phoenix, after the mythological bird that was reborn from its own ashes.
After two name changes, we now know that browser as Firefox.
Yet this once lean and mean browser has gained quite a bit of weight during its maturity, and now its bulk even overshadows its predecessor, which has apparently been learning from its child how to slim down and become lean and mean its own self, even with the extra modules (email, address book, and a web page editor) it carried along with it. As a part of this slimming down, Mozilla itself went through a name change to SeaMonkey, becoming an alternative to Firefox for those who want a more complete, all-in-one Internet suite.
To me, however, SeaMonkey has actually surpassed Firefox in terms of speed and ease of use, and now with Firefox 3 adding strange new features such as the new URL history bar and the inability to edit a File form field manually, SeaMonkey is starting to look much more attractive to me for my main browser. It even has the older (and my preferred) single download progress dialog rather than the download manager (although it offers that as an alternative as well), plus it can even use many of Firefox’s extensions (like my favorite, NoScript).
There are a few things I have to get used to, such as not being able to middle-click a tab to close it (it pastes-and-goes from the clipboard instead) and a few other missing features from Firefox like reopening closed tabs, but so far, the speed and relative stability seems to be worth the effort.
And the slow crawl toward Firefox 3 goes on with another beta version. Here’s what I noticed:
So quite a bit of things I’d rather not have or other problems, but a few very good things here. I’m optimistic that the final will be quite good, though I have a feeling they’re going to keep that silly fulltext search from the address bar and the file browser from the typein File field. At least they have came out with an addon for the former.
Wow, I can’t believe I forgot this:
* Copy/paste: Once I became accustomed to the simplicity and awesomeness of X copy/paste (highlight to copy, middle-click to paste), I can no longer stand the extra step of hitting CTRL-C/CTRL-V or right click->copy, right click->paste. It’s so simple using the highlight/middle-click option, and frustrates me so when I try to highlight/middle-click text in Windows and it doesn’t work.
