- Fedora 12 claims PulseAudio improvements. Here’s hoping sound will actually work after suspend+resume again.
- Also: iPod train wreck of the morning was the Cardcaptor Sakura theme followed by Garbage’s Supervixen.
- What’s with all the “Be a social worker!” spam lately? It’s a change from the usual porn, pills, watches & software, but out of left field.
- Future reference: Though there’s no lever to pop the hatch on the Prius, unlocking the doors allows someone else to open it from outside
Tag: Linux
SCOpe
- About time! @brionv reports:
After 6 years SCO finally dumps the exec who ran Caldera’s Linux biz into the ground.
- Doozy of an update in the copyright case over Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster. (via @ThisIsTrue)
This is why you vote
The code name for Fedora 9 Linux has been chosen, and it’s going to be Sulphur. Because a foul-smelling rock associated with rotten eggs and depictions of Hell is just what we want to identify an operating system. (Actually, it might not be too far off for Windows Vista.)
Bathysphere was only 8 votes behind. Weird, but considerably cooler.
Oh, well. At least it’s not Mayonnaise or Chupacabra. And some of the other names on that list are considerably worse.
When digiKam Failed to Connect
In the decade I’ve been using Linux, it’s gone from something that required lots of technical know-how just to set up, to something that (in its major flavors) can auto-detect most hardware and provides friendly GUIs for most configuration tasks. But every once in a while, I have the kind of experience that would turn a new user off of Linux. Usually because Fedora has decided to change something during an update.
In this case, it was a digital camera problem. Since we bought our Canon PowerShot SD600 last December, I’ve used KDE’s digiKam to transfer and manage the photos. DigiKam detected the camera and accessed the photos right out of the box, no configuration needed beyond telling it to remember the model. But something changed in the last two weeks, and last night I started getting an error message: Failed to connect to the camera. Oddly enough, it could still detect the camera when it was connected. But it couldn’t display or download the images.
I searched all over, hitting dead end after dead end, until I got a hint that it was a permissions problem. Continue reading
5 things I want to see in Opera
I’ve been away from the Opera community for a month or so, focusing on the upheaval in comics fandom with The Flash, so I don’t know if anyone’s tagged me for Opera Watch’s “5 things I’d like to see in Opera” meme.
So I’m just going to throw my hat in the ring before I head off to Comic-Con tomorrow.
1. Inline spell-check and other improvements. Yeah, on-demand spell-check is available, but it’s so much more convenient to have problem words highlighted as you type. I’d also like to see an "Ignore All" button, in case I don’t want to teach the spell checker a word that appears repeatedly in a post. And it would be great if it would recognize and skip URLs and HTML/BBCode tags. I get really tired of hitting "Ignore" on things like href and http, but I don’t want add them to the dictionary in case I accidentally type them in the body of a post.
2. Apt and Yum repositories for Linux. Opera’s Linux offerings break down to about half a dozen binaries, which are available in 3 forms: .rpm, .deb, and tar.gz. Opera doesn’t have to provide a separate repository for each distribution, just one yum repo for each .rpm, and one apt repo for each .deb. Once the user installs the repository, the OS’s own update system will be able to take care of updating Opera. (As an example, see what Adobe has started doing with its yum repository for Flash.)
3. Delete all cookies on close with site-specific exceptions. I’ve given up trying to figure out what overrides what in Opera’s cookie settings. What I’d like to do is just wipe everything on exit, with a list of sites that are allowed to keep cookies across sessions. Firefox does this with the "Keep until… I close Firefox" setting. I can sort of manage it in Opera by telling it to delete all new cookies when exiting, but it’s more of a pain to add a new site. Instead of just adding it to the list of exceptions, I have to disable the option, log in to the site, then re-enable it. And that’s assuming the site doesn’t have to update the cookie later on.
4. Experimental CSS3 properties, especially box-shadow and border-radius. I know Opera 9.5 is supposed to have a bunch of CSS3 capabilities, but so far they’ve been cagey on just what’s on the list.
5. Wii emulator mode for the desktop version. I’m not likely to pick up a Wii, but I’d like to make sure my websites look right. Small-screen rendering is great for simulating mobile devices, and the Opera Mini simulator takes care of that platform, but I can only go on descriptions for the Wii version.
I’m not big on the whole tagging thing, so I won’t tag anyone else. (Besides, most of the people I could think of have probably already posted by now.)
*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.