silkodyssey.net

Newly discovered opensuse 11 Gem

I’ve been using opensuse 11 since it was released a few days ago and while there isn’t a lot in terms of new features that jump at you, I recently found one that I would love to see distributions emulate. I am talking about its ability to find an configure other operating systems that are installed on a computer.

You may be thinking, “almost all distros do this”, and while that’s true Opensuse is special in that it takes the concept a bit further. When I select an operating system to boot from the grub menu, it loads the grub menu for that specific operating system.

This is a real life saver because I have a multiboot system that in addition to opensuse includes windows xp, ubuntu hardy heron, and fedora 9. From time to time the update tools for these systems would download a new version of the linux kernel that would require an update to the grub boot configuration. This is not a big deal usually when I am using grub for that particular distribution but it is often inconvenient for the other distributions as the updated boot configuration is not readily available.

To get around this would require manually editing the grub configuration for the distro with the active grub installation. This gets boring very quickly but thanks to opensuse, it’s something we can beging to worry about less. So thanks to those guys for that piece of innovation and let’s hope the other distros adopt it.

More »

23. June 2008linux 0 Comments »

Firefox 3 First Impressions

I’ve been using firefox 3 in various forms for a while now. The two linux distros that I use, Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Fedora 9 both came with beta 5 installed and since have been updated with the release candidates. I am using it on windows as well since the first release candidate. Overall I must say that I am impressed with it. I usually browse with a lot of tabs open and that really brings firefox 2 to it’s knees. With firefox 3 it takes a lot more tabs to get to that threshold. The primary reason for this I think is that firefox 2 probably didn’t handle javascript in a very efficient manner. With tabs open for sites like digg.com processor usage would tend to go up quickly but it seems like in firefox3 some improvements have been made in this area.

What I like most about firefox 3 though it how the develops seem to have recognized common problem users face and have implemented solutions for them. Some of the things that come to mind are the smart bookmarks that record the recently closed tabs so that in case i accidentally close a tab I know where to look to get it back. Also sometimes I need to close the browser but I would like to restart it at a later time and continue where I left off with all my tabs. Firefox now offers the option to save my tabs when I close the application.

I am sure there are a lot of other features left to discover but these to me are the most striking as they relate to how I use firefox. It’s a very intuitive application. It not only offers the features users want but also in a unique and easily accessible way that least gets in the way of it’s primary function to browse web pages.

Firefox in my mind is no doubt the best browser on the market and with its third iteration it just got a whole lot better.

More »

13. June 2008Uncategorized 0 Comments »

Avoid Slow Repositories with Ubuntu

We’ve all had that experience where our default apt server runs a little bit slower than usual. Well in this post I am going to demonstrate a nifty feature that synaptic has to automatically determine the fastest repository server.

1. Launch synaptic then select repositories from the Settings menu.

2. In the repositories dialog. Select the other option.

3. Click select best server.

4. A series of tests will be run to determine the fastest server.

5. The fastest server will be selected. Click choose server to accept.

6. You will be notified that your repository information has been changed. Click reload to fix that.