Gentoo update
Have been playing around quite a bit with the gentoo installation on my laptop and at work. Yea, I now use linux almost exclusively on two of the three computers I work on. Just wanted to post an update on some of the cool stuff I’ve installed.
Firstly, I got swsusp2 (hibernate to disk) working, thanks to this howto. Works almost perfectly, including 3d acceleration under X using the X-DRI driver (the ATI binary driver is too buggy). Suspend takes about 5 seconds, and resuming from it about 20. Well, not perfect, but its a start! What I want to do next is to setup a good ACPI configuration to take care of frequency scaling, auto-hibernate, auto LCD brightness control etc.
Also found this really cool add-on to Gnome called gdesklets. This lets you add dynamic content to the desktop. Very flexible and highly configurable. Also provides great eye-candy. Imagine, the latest slashdot headlines, and weather info on the desktop updated in real time! Maybe I’ll try Freedesktop’s Xserver sometime if I am feeling really brave… Cant wait for it to become more mainstream.
Its interesting how once linux was criticized for being too dull and not very fun to look at. Today it is exactly the opposite. Windows is easily the ugliest looking OS around, and it is a battle between Gnome, Kde, MacOSX, and other nifty WMs are fighting for the prettiest desktop!
The only thing that is currently preventing me from switching my home desktop/server to gentoo is iTunes. I really like this app, and have been unable to find something under linux that comes anywhere close in terms of library management, ease of use, and ipod integration. But several apps like rhythmbox, musik, muine, zinf come quite close, and I have a feeling that I will be able to make the switch soon.
May 31st, 2004 at 9:00 am
hail the new Linux !! Linux UI has matured quite rapidly in the last few years. Dynamic content has been there for quite some time now, primarily pioneered by KDE’s `karamba’. There was a time when I was obsessed with eye-candy. I got bored of it very quickly though
It was cool to read the headlines & weather on my desktop, but I found myself not being able to focus more on work and wasting time on just tweaking eye-candy around 
That said, I would like to see 2 more things being done better in Linux:
1. Good email clients: Mutt is the best one I used … comes with a lot of customization. But the huge amount of bugs in mutt really gets to me. Mozilla / Thunderbird comes a close second. But its biggest -ve point is that it takes too much time to load. Oh yes, it can’t be used without X
My work environment often consists of machines which do not have X.
2. Good office tools: No OpenOffice doesn’t cut it. It might be a good replacement, but not a good application by itself. Nothing even compares to the slew of features offered by MS word. Granted some of the features may not be useful or be harmless … but just try writing out a homework with figures & tables in OO and in Word. You will soon find out the difference
-Sayantan.
May 31st, 2004 at 9:49 am
Yea, karamba and superkaramba look very interesting. Indeed, gdesklets is simply trying to copy them to gnome.
I’m not sure how mutt can be improved much. I use it for most of my primary work, and am in the process of switching from thunderbird to mutt completely for the same reason you mention (I want to access my mail by simply sshing to my machine).
About text editing/tables/figures etc, one word should answer your question: latex! Look at lyx, kile, and the best, vim-latex for nice editors.