I’m baaack! It was nice to get emails from readers asking when I’ll have a new post, but it took me longer to get caught up on two weeks worth of newsfeeds than I expected. A big part of that is thanks in part to the way some of the planets I’ve subscribed to are set up. Most newsfeeds are set up so that when someone’s feed reader hits the server it presents the 10-20 newest posts, with a few sites offering as many as 50 posts. Some of the planets I read went so far back that I’m not certain but I think I may have gotten all of the posts I hadn’t seen yet.
Anyway, I had over 100 posts waiting to be read from enough sources that when I finally got Evolution fired up earlier this week I ended up with over a thousand posts and messages to deal with. I’ve decided to not share many of the older links I had found before my power supply died (yoooouge thanks to the friend who bought me a new PSU!) but I do have some posts I want to make sure you guys and gals know about.
- Jun Auza: Linux Keyboard Shortcuts: Safe Way to Exit During System Freezes. We’ve all had times where our computer seems to lock up in the middle of doing something. Windows users run some serious risks of borking their system if they simply shut the computer off and turns it back on (also known as a hard reset), but Linux users can do that with the risk of little more than losing any new data they were working on. Jun knows ways to get the system responding to you without the data loss that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace can cause when you force the end to your current session. I need to add these to my PDA so I have them handy the next time I need them.
- Jon Beebe: Installing Fonts in Ubuntu 8.10. It’s the rare user that never adds any additional fonts to their computer, and as the Mac4Lin dev team discovered the process changed when Gnome 2.22.2 was included with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). Jon gives us the skinny on how to add fonts in Ubuntu Intrepid, and you’ll probably want to bookmark his post for future reference.
- Thomas Thurman: So why is Human so slow? It turns out that Human, the default theme on Ubuntu, takes longer then any other common theme to finish drawing the screen. (Thomas has numbers to back that statement up.) How do we fix that? (@infra: We may want to look at the Mac4Lin themes in the light of this article.)
- Michael Rooney: Gnome Do 0.8 released, awesomeness ensues! The latest version of GNOME Do has been officially released, and while I covered it when it was in alpha stage Michael gives some additional coverage to the one thing I dislike in it: the Docky theme. Some folks love it, but I’m in the camp that will stick to AWN for my dock.
- Ken Kovash: Some Firefox Users Still on Fx2. The metrics team over at Mozilla is wondering why some users haven’t upgraded to Firefox 3 yet. Ken looks at the issue, but probably doesn’t realize that some users hate the UI decisions that the Fx3 dev team made and may even hate Fx3 with the heat of a thousand nuns. I have Fx3 installed but I use it only as a backup to Epiphany and I’m considering rolling back to Fx2 as my backup browser. I sure as hell don’t want to touch Fx 3.1 with a 50-foot pole thanks to some of what I’m seeing in terms of UI decisions. (Granted, I haven’t even looked at the daily build threads over at Mozillazine in a while because I honestly don’t care that much about what the Fx devs are doing. That’s how much I hate what I’ve seen.)
- Michael Rooney: How Windows Vista, Digg, and Ubuntu landed me a Sweet Job. And you thought Vista wasn’t good for anything.
Monkeys aside, Michael has a great story to tell, and anyone who has any interest in open source software should read it.
That’s almost it for now. I have two free PDF downloads that you’ll want to get onto your hard drive, but I’ll put them in a separate post.
