Digital Lair

Category: Open Source

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Graphics / Open Source

The sad state of Linux OpenGL drivers: find the vendor!

The state of Linux drivers is a very old, sad and sometimes infuriating tale. I use Linux exclusively at work, 70% of my time at home; and still whenever I want to upgrade a driver, whether it’s ATI or NVIDIA, I throw a couple of Hail Marys just in case (and a couple of Bloody Marys most of the times after that). Rich Geldreich works at Valve, and is currently improving OpenGL support for games for SteamOS. His rantings about the drivers are pretty much spot on, but he doesn’t actually mention names of vendors. That’s left as an exercise...

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Open Source

KDE ships beta 1 of its next-gen Plasma workspace

Gnome and its derivatives do seem to have the upper hand these days; but the other camp is not resting on its laurels. KDE announced today that it is releasing the first beta of its next generation Plasma workspace, in what will eventually become KDE 5.0 Since the alpha, a wide range of changes has been made. Many are of course small yet important stability, performance and bug fixes, but there have also been larger changes. For example, the introduction of a new Application Menu widget, which is a reimplementation of what originally debuted as ‘Homerun Kicker’ in the homerun...

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Open Source

Debian and Plymouth

I’ve used Ubuntu for the past few years, and I’ve watched it become more and more bloated, to the point that it was almost unusable on my work PC (P4, 2GB RAM). So I took a friend’s advice and installed Debian Squeeze, and oh boy, what a difference it has been! More snappy, and half the RAM. Anyway, since then I’ve been adding stuff to my installation, and Plymouth was one of them. Here are the instructions to get it installed just in case someone actually uses Debian: 0. Install v86d package. 1. /etc/default/grub Replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”…” by GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash nomodeset...

Blog entry tool 15

Open Source

Blog entry tool

So I was looking for a tool that will enable me to blog easily from Ubuntu – Windows Live Writer is sorely missed, and unfortunately there is no way to make it run with Wine (yes, I’ve tried). On the other hand, I found Gnome Blog, which is a nifty Gnome Panel applet, which connects to your blog and lets you post whatever you like easily. It supports all the popular blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress, and it just works Hopefully this will enable me to blog more :p Here’s the link: Gnome Blog

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Open Source

Installing Linux : Reloaded

Many of you may remember my previous journal entry about Installing Linux – you can still find in on Driverheaven if you are curious. Well, after one and a half year that has passed, it’s a good opportunity to do a part 2, since a couple of days ago I decided to reinstall my Linux partition. The reason was rather simple really; I like toying with stuff all the time, and when you do plumbing after plumbing, the poor OS at some point sits down and says “I won’t take this anymore! Reinstall me!”. Well, I found some time the...