Sound Suse!
mandag, desember 29, 2003
What do you know, I now have sound with Suse! :-) - It was a matter of turning off PnP-checking for the card in the sound setup in Yast. I'll have a more detailed description later on...
NEW! Opera 7.5P1 (and Suse)
fredag, desember 26, 2003
Opera 7.5 preview bounced in my face just as I was installing Suse 9.0 on my outdated machine. I haven't had much time to really test it yet (Opera that is), but here are some highlights:
- IRC chat! For the time being, it's just a "front-end for chat" Opera-folks say. I hope that means they will include Jabber soon too. After all, Jabber is about standards, which Opera has touted since day one.
- New, uncluttered default toolbar and menu setup. This must be the best news since version 7 came about. The one thing people complain most about in Opera is the clutter which can easily be removed.
- RSS Reader! Heh... You can still use my stylesheet to preview the feed before putting it in Opera's really integrated solution. Nicely done, it acts in the mail-tab and behaves rather nicely. Hmm... Why not make a new tab for News, and put newsgroups and newsfeeds there, leaving the mail alone?
- A funny feature in the hotlist called Start-panel. When activated, it pops up in your face taking the whole browser like another homepage, letting you search the web and your mail. This is supposed to replace the current startup dialog. I hope we will be able to customize this too, like we can customize the dialogs.
- Improved Mail (M2). - Again. This time it's faster than ever. Really, really fast. And it lets you use Aspell to check your spelling! Oh, and if you don't want to use mail, it is now enough to remove the m2.dll file in the opera directory and everything mail will vanish. Before, you had to do that manually.
- ....And a lot of other good fixes and stuff. Check The changelog
And I'm installing SuSe. I like it a lot, except:
- It feels a little slow. I must do something about that.
- It doesn't detect the onboard ESS es1869 soundcard. I had Fedore Core1 installed before SuSe, and I was able to get sound working there after some playing with sndconfig. SuSe uses ALSA, which doesn't seem to like the old Compaq. I guess there is a reason, and it must be possible to do something about that too, like perhaps replacing ALSA with sndconfig.
RSS Revisited
onsdag, desember 03, 2003
After publishing my CSS for RSS in Opera, I've gotten very little feedback. Perhaps people just don't want RSS? More likely I'm witnessing what other people deveoping things experience: The black hole downloaders. I know, I'm one of those black holes myself, getting stuff off the web is convenient. You too often forget that there are actual people behind it all.
Anyways... I have gotten to a point where I can say that the CSS really works well. I have updated it with new colors that reflect your own system, and more importantly the rarer features of RSS are now supported.
I'm not even near finished though, so get mine and publish yours for the benefit of all newsaholics and bloggers around.
