Tagged: linux

Konqueror hidden goodies


I’m liking Konqueror more and more each day. Just today I discovered this wonderful neat trick. I had noticed that once in a while some weird characters would appear all over my konqueror window and I thought the display was going bad or something was messed up in Konqueror.

Well, it turns out that if you press “Ctrl”, Konqueror will assign single-character hotkeys to each of the //visible// links on the page. And so you can just press ’1′ or ‘X’ or whatever key konqueror has assigned to a link to jump to that page without ever having to move around your mouse. And its a great accessibility feature as well — when I don’t have a mouse handy, I hate pressing tabs to move around links.

And I just realized that Konqueror is really smart in figuring out exactly **which** links it should consider. Try it out for yourself.

Neat.

**Update (2005/10/12)**: this not only works for links, but also for form fields and buttons! I’m attaching a screenshot below.

stream/konqueror-keys.png

To each his own


Russell Beattie (via Planet Apache) has a post on [[http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008631.html|why he might switch back to XP from OS X]]. I won’t judge the post here — lets just say that not all of the points he makes might seem valid to you. Nevertheless it spawned off a good discussion and infact some of the comments make more sense than the original post itself.

The general feel (and I agree with this) is that religion apart, all of the big 3 desktop competitors out there (M$, Apple, Linux and friends) are not too different when it comes to functionality. What works best for you is a personal choice. If you are more productive in OS X, stick to it. But if not, then make the switch. There’s no reason to stick around with Apple believing that they simply //are// the best when it comes to building a highly productive yet good looking and user friendly desktop environment.

I’ve often been tempted to buy a Mac, and I usually give up in the hope that some day I’ll get a Mac without having to pay for it. Heh heh :-) Well, I am allowed to dream, ain’t I?

Linux vs. Solaris


Back when I was doing the advanced OS class at IIT Kanpur, I was really impressed with all the good work that Sun had been doing on Solaris back in the 90s. But since then, Solaris development seemed to have taken a back seat. Atleast, so it seemed considering the lack of publications (compared to earlier when there were some really good papers on Solaris). However, with OpenSolaris on the horizon, things seem to be picking up. Eric Schrok, a Solaris kernel developer recently wrote a [[http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock/20040921|blog entry]] on the direction OpenSolaris is taking, and how Sun’s approach to “open” software is a bit different from that of Linux.

Though it wasn’t as apparent to me, to some it seemed that the article hinted that Solaris was “better” than Linux (which it is, in some areas). Greg K-H responded with a [[http://www.kroah.com/log/2004/09/23/#2004_09_23_sun_rebuttal|post on his blog]]. Eric [[http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock/20040924#rebutting_a_rebuttal|responded]], firing off [[http://www.kroah.com/log/2004/09/26/#2004_09_26_sun_rebuttal_round2|another response]] from Greg.

After reading through all the four posts, I must admit that Solaris sounds a hell lot more interesting than it ever did to me. And Greg’s position is hardly as sound as Eric’s. But I agree with Eric that Solaris and Linux both have different priorities, and therefore it really doesn’t make sense to “compare” them.

Why KDE?


I have been using KDE as my desktop environment ever since I started using Linux. Everyone once in a while though, I had the urge to try out something new. I moved in and out of GNOME a couple of times. Over the past couple of months, my desire to try out something new was fuelled by the fact that a lot of really Linux savvy users that I know rarely used KDE or GNOME — most would be using something weird like Enlightenment or Fluxbox or Xfce or IceWM and so on. I didn’t want to be left behind.

So over the past few weeks, I tried out a lot of things, and it was an honest effort mind you. Just to be sure that I didn’t end up using my old desktop, I uninstalled KDE before moving on to anything else. My first shot was at Enlightenment. Lightning fast start up, slick (albeit a bit weird) looking desktop. Extremely, //extremely// configurable. I’m sure E (short for Englitenment) could be a great desktop. But its more or less useless until you spend some time configuring it. I wasn’t in the mood to do that. Besides I really missed the usual niceties of KDE/GNOME like the system tray or the task bar.

Next, I tried GNOME. To be honest, I really liked it. Damn fast, damn slick — much better than what it was when I had seriously tried it last (but that was around 3 years back). I loved the themes, the control panel — and one has to admit, GTK2 is really really good. However, a few things really disgusted me — the main GNOME panel absolutely sucked — the icons didn’t look good, they were too close together at times, no icon zooming, look cluttered at times or too far apart, and most importantly, there was no news ticker applet. Now this might seem like a silly reason for not liking GNOME, but I really miss knewsticker — its just awesome! Apart from some minor quirks, GNOME was good though. I mean look and feel apart, there’s really not much of a difference between KDE and GNOME functionally. But like most other applications (be it editors, desktops, browsers), its the minor quirks that make all the difference.

Still enthused, I went ahead and tried Xfce. I must say that I was impressed. Its faster than both GNOME and KDE. The settings manager is really well organized. Its GTK2 look is actually better than GNOME itself. And its the only thing I’ve seen so far that can really effectively use both your GNOME and KDE stuff. For instance, you could have the main panel use GNOME icons, the file manager use KDE icons and everything else use Xfce default icons. Same goes for window decorations, borders, and desktop themes. On the flip side, a news ticker was missing here as well. Also, there’s no straight forward way of adding desktop icons in Xfce (though I don’t use them much anyways). The default shell Xfce uses is xterm, which kind of sucks. I could always use konsole or gnome-terminal, but that would be kind of cheating right? Another thing I missed was an easy way to configure keys (especially multimedia keys) on my keyboard. KDE, GNOME and Enlightenment all really excel at doing this. I might be wrong of course, there might be easy way I just overlooked.

Anyways, after doing all this for a few weeks, I realized that after spending some time in configurations, more or less all of the desktops were equal as far as functionality went. But eventually I did come back to KDE. And funny as it may sound, I realize that the clinching factor in favour of KDE was the knewsticker applet :-D

Multimedia support in Linux


One of the few reasons that I have to (reluctantly) boot into M$ WinXP is the lack of adequate multimedia support. Of course, everyone knows that Linux’s support for multimedia files is unsurpassed (many of my friends have switched to using mplayer in WinXP and MacOS X as well!). However, what is lacking is device driver support.

Things such as web cams, video conferencing and voice chats are still a pain in Linux. The [[http://gaim-vv.sf.net/|gaim-vv]] project is taking a step in this direction. However, AFAIK the project is not yet ready for daily use. Then there is [[http://gnomemeeting.org/|GnomeMeeting]] which provides an alternative to the commericially popular NetMeeting software. However, its usage is hampered by the lack of availibility of device drivers for most of the hardware in the market. But the situation is rapidly improving.

The [[http://skype.com/|skype]] messenger offers a text and voice based solution that is functionally and interface-wise almost at par with its Windows version. I succesfully tried out voice chatting from my Debian box with friends running Linux as well as Windows. The sound quality is **much** better than that obtainable with say MSN or Yahoo! messenger. Advanced features such as conference calls are not available yet, but coming soon. You can, though, make PC to phone calls using Skype.