I’ve got a quick review of Firefox 2.0 over on Linux.com today, with additional screenshot goodness for those of you who haven’t already switched over to Firefox 2.0. (What are you waiting for? Do it now!)
This is a great release, but I’m wondering when the next revolutionary feature is going to debut. As silly as it may sound, tabbed browsing was really a major leap forward in usability — and nothing since has really been quite so dramatic an improvement. Firefox 2.0 adds a number of nifty new features and improvements, but nothing revolutionary.
Still, the feed reading improvements and spell checking features are worth the upgrade in and of themselves. If you haven’t already, head over to the Moz site and hook yourself up with the latest release.
I’ve been playing with Gaim betas for 2.0 since the Gaim team started releasing them last year. I started a review when the first Gaim beta was released, and then they dumped that, and released beta 2. So, I just held off on writing a review until it looked like the Gaim folks were close enough to 2.0 to merit the review.
So, there’s a review up on Linux.com with a few screenshots from 2.0beta4. If you’re running Ubuntu Edgy or Fedora Core 6, you’ll see beta3, which is pretty close to beta4, but not quite.
Overall, I’m really happy with beta4, except for the account status system. For some reason, despite a massive number of complaints about it from users, the Gaim devs seem to have their hearts set on sticking with a “one-size-fits-all” default that is (in my opinion) horrible. They’ve even acknowledged that they’re getting a bunch of complaints about it, but seem to have the opinion that they know better than the users.
Gaim devs, I have the utmost respect for y’all. Gaim’s a great application with one little nagging problem — you might like it, but the rest of us poor, unenlightened users hate it. Please change it back. Thanks.
So, Firefox 2.0 is due to be released tomorrow… or today, if you believe some of the posts on Digg, Slashdot, Metafilter and everywhere else. Of course, what’s really happened is someone with way too much time on their hands is sniffing around any FTP server to see if files turn up ahead of the official announcement — and then they post that info to Slashdot or whatever, and end up causing problems for a number of other folks:
- Digg and Reddit posts linking to direct FTP mirrors could be costing the operators of those mirrors hundreds to thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills, or may cause them to crash by linking directly to them. This could cause them to “un-volunteer” their services as a mirror, making it even harder to obtain Firefox on release days.
- People posting direct link to FTP mirrors don’t know if that mirror is a member of the Mozilla FTP Mirror Farm, or some random, unverified mirror. We work hard to verify that the mirrors in our farm are serving the same bits we released, and we cannot make the same claim about other mirrors that aren’t part of our farm. When using direct FTP links to random mirrors, users run the risk of downloading bits that have not been checked to ensure they do not contain a virus or trojan.
- “That’s ok,” you say: “I link directly to ftp.mozilla.org!” That can be even worse! Killing the project’s FTP server does not help anyone, least of all people trying to obtain Firefox builds. And it makes for a grumpy IT group. And nobody wants grumpy IT groups. Especially a day before a release.
Be sure to read the whole post on preed’s blog — he makes a lot of good points. This has been going on for years and years. I don’t really entertain much hope that it will change, but maybe a few readers will read this and understand that it’s really bad netiquette.
As I mentioned earlier, I spent a big part of the weekend upgrading my workstation from Ubuntu Dapper to Ubuntu Edgy.
I think I have a sort of situational amnesia that prevents me from remembering what a pain in the posterior upgrades really are, or I’d probably just make do with the reliable install that is working just fine as-is. But, I want the new shiny, and that comes at a price.
Ubuntu installs a workable set of default applications, but it doesn’t install all the stuff that I use every day, so a fresh install has meant a lot of reinstalling and (in some cases) recompiling. (more…)
I’ve been playing with Ubuntu Edgy for several weeks, but on test machines and the laptop that I use to browse the Web while watching DVDs — not on my main desktop.
Yesterday, I took the plunge. I decided to go for a clean install this time ’round rather than doing a dist-upgrade to Edgy. I didn’t have many problems with dist-upgrading from Breezy to Dapper, but I wanted to repartition the drive anyway (I’d been wasting way too much space on the / partition, and kept running low on space on the /home partition…).
It took longer to copy my data to the external USB drive and make a DVD backup of my crucial data (mail, writing, etc.) than it did to actually install Ubuntu. The Edgy install took very little time at all.
I’m finding a few little KDE bugs here and there (there’s no way to resize an external taskbar now, setting the preference for Titlebar wheel event has no effect, and a few other minor glitches) but I’m not sure if those are issues with Edgy or issues with KDE 3.5.5 itself.
I’m also not terribly fond of the move to installing “vim-tiny” by default instead of full-fledged Vim, but I’ve already installed the full Vim package, so no biggie there.
Still busy re-installing all the packages I use regularly that aren’t part of the default install, or Ubuntu at all. Also contemplating a move from Sylpheed to another mailer, since it’s been a year since I moved to Sylpheed from Thunderbird and I am itching to try something new. I may wait until Thunderbird 2.0 is released, though…
It’s been 10 long years since I started using Linux, though I didn’t start using Linux full time until 1999. Slackware Linux was the first distro I used, and I stuck with it for many years. From Slackware I tried Storm Linux (or Stormix), Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, Xandros, and a number of other distros before I finally settled on Ubuntu.
Oddly enough, I’ve never run Red Hat or Fedora as a desktop distro for more than the time it takes to write a review — just never really got into Red Hat for some reason.
So, it was a fun trip down memory lane to work on the review of Slackware 11 the last few weeks. Check it out on Linux.com if you have a few minutes.
I still have fond memories of Slackware, but I’ve gotten spoiled by the “it just works” factor of Ubuntu, not to mention the fact that I really like APT and having a enormous package repository like Ubuntu Universe. Slackware has a decent package selection, but nothing like Debian or Ubuntu’s.
I am, however, quite glad that Slackware is still alive and kicking. I can’t find the URL right now, but someone wrote an opinion piece last year asking “is Slackware still relevant?” — which is, of course, a stupid question. As long as Slackware has one or two users, it’s relevant to them — which is all that really matters in open source.
I just read through some of the comments on the Nexenta review I have up on Linux.com.
There are some fairly clueful comments, and then the inevitable drive-by nitpicks. I sometimes wonder if people only read articles in an attempt to find errors.
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