This guy just saved my sanity! If you are running Eclipse 3.5 and are noticing “funny” behavior (buttons not working, certain fields not appearing), then follow these instructions. It looks like Eclipse is doing some nasty stuff advanced hacking in SWT on GTK. This bug is fixed in 3.6M2 but you can work around the issue in Eclipse 3.5 by launching Eclipse through the following small shell script (assuming Eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse-3....
If you need to install linux on a laptop, choose Ubuntu over the other derivations. There is simply more time and people working on the Gnome version of Ubuntu versus the KDE or Fluxbox derivations. When I installed Kubuntu 09.04 (Jaunty) things weren’t “just working” like they do on my desktop. Having always preferred KDE to Gnome, I have never really tried the pure “Ubuntu” experience. I have to say, especially for laptops, the experience is radically different and ultimately superior....
Kubuntu 09.04 (Jaunty) has been an absolute pleasure to use on my home desktop. Everything just works, and works really well. I happen to choose an Nvidia graphics card when I put it together. Turns out that was a very good decision. Lets turn to my laptop (a Thinkpad T42). It has an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 inside. There is a semi decent open source driver implementation that it used by default....
So I discovered that Guitar Pro 5 “works” with wine (after installing Kubuntu 64 09.04). I say “works” because the MIDI part doesn’t (though there are lots of guides to wrap timidly around wine), but GP5 uses RSE (real sound engine I think), so some of the instruments don’t use MIDI. It’s close enough to practice against. I also got TF2 to “work” but unfortunately won’t be a replacement any time soon....
I’ve been checking up on the progress of KDE 4 using the Kubuntu member repository as it moved through various betas and a few days ago the official 4.1 release moved in. While it obviously lacks the many years of polish that went into KDE3, at this point its basically mature enough that I’m now using it as my full time desktop. Many of the applications do not yet have KDE4 versions available, but you can seamlessly run their KDE3 counterparts in the KDE4 desktop....
[K]ubuntu 7.10 was released today. This will be my first attempt at a serious linux upgrade (which is complicated by the fact that I’m not running a vanilla Feisty at the moment). So we’ll see how this process goes. (Backup, backup, backup) Gutsy has a lot of great stuff in it – Built in compiz, restricted driver management that (supposedly) works, Dolphin as default file manager, new debian package manager, and more....
I did a little clean up on the wpg2 plugin so now all the links go to my gallery rather than an embedded page (much better now) as well as clean up a little security issue =) FYI, Gallery 2.2.1 was just released, however I haven’t upgraded yet. Things are settled now (even though there are quite a few features I would like to use now), I think I’ll let the release simmer for a before taking the plunge....
Wine is the open source Windows emulator program for Linux – A very handy thing to have working well if you ever want to make the transition. I have already determined that when I put together my next desktop which will hopefully be some time next year, I will run Kubuntu (If any of this sounds familiar, I already blogged about it =) Cossover Office is a program put out by Codeweavers that is based on Wine....
I know… Linux distributions and their funky names. But this one is a quality distribution. I had never tried Debian or a Debian-based distribution before, and I have to say I’m impressed. Debian itself is an interesting community. It has three “releases” (stable, testing, unstable). Stable is always incredibly out of date, while unstable takes new updates as they are available. The key to any Linux distribution (IMO) is the packaging method....