inportb

I’d known from the beginning that KDE 4 libraries and applications could be installed on Windows. I hadn’t actually tried installing them on Windows because I’ve been warned that they’re unstable (Windows support is new), bulky (there’re many dependencies), and inefficient (KDE is not just a widget library). I’ve also heard reports of excellent integration and ease of installation, so I decided to give it a try. The test system is a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3 with no theme.

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WebKit support in Konqueror is coming along nicely in the form of a KPart called webkitkde. If you’re running Konqueror on Ubuntu 8.10, it’s really easy to try WebKit without disrupting your usual workflow:

1. install webkitkde
2. when viewing a Web page in Konqueror, select from the menu: View > View Mode > WebKit

It’s beta-quality software, but it works alright. Konqueror defaults to KHTML whenever navigation occurs, so you have to manually select WebKit for each page. Now you can do some basic WebKit-compatibility testing using Konqueror.

Traditionally, installing fonts on Linux meant creating directories, copying files, and refreshing the font cache. Today I discovered a neat Windows-y font installer in the form of the fonts URL scheme. Open the file manager to fonts:/ and installing fonts should be as easy as copy and paste; removing fonts is just as easy. Through this mechanism, one can manage both personal fonts and (with sufficient privileges) system fonts.

Excited about the discovery, I decided to have some fun. A while ago, I’d purchased a disc full of fonts. My Kubuntu setup comes with some 400 system fonts, but I wanted to find out just how many my laptop could handle. After I copied in several thousand TrueType and OpenType fonts, I fired up OpenOffice.org and the GIMP for a quick test. While OO.o was not able to use the OpenType fonts, everything was pretty smooth. But the real test was just about to begin. The disc included some 150000 font files, and I proceeded to install all of them.

At the moment I’m taking a break at 56398 fonts (4.0GB). It takes a couple of minutes to load the desktop after logging in, and many operations have slowed drastically. So uh… I guess installing lots of fonts does affect performance. It would be interesting to perform the same experiment on Windows and Mac OS X.

November 13th, 2008: I now have 124479 fonts (8.1GB) in my personal fonts directory; I figured this is as slow as I could tolerate, so I’m going to stop here and revert to the original state of zero fonts. That was fun!

I bought a bunch of DVD’s last night at the video store. When I tried playing them on my computer, I found every one of them unwatchable. Naturally, I was concerned about the health of my DVD drive, but it was able to play some other videos just fine. Then it hit me that the discs that I just bought were intentionally corrupted for copy-protection. So I took the defective discs back to the store for a refund; but the employees noted that the packages were opened, alledged that I had copied the discs, and refused to accept the products. Now I’m sitting at home with a bunch of broken discs that I’d wasted good money on. Would the next logical step be to circumvent the copy-protection and generate clean, watchable copies? Perhaps it would save time in the future to visit the bay for pre-cracked videos rather than the store for defective merchandise.

It’s perfectly reasonable to spend money on videos and encourage the production of more high-quality products, but I love how DRM (digital rights management) is forcing lawful individuals into shady dealings. When someone buys an item, he/she expects it to work and has the right to use it in any way. DRM violates that right and often trashes an otherwise-fine product. It treats legitimate customers as pirates and stomps on the work of artists. Meanwhile, the real pirates continue to traffic their warez. Isn’t it time people realized that DRM doesn’t work?

A few hours later: I now have DRM-free copies and a bunch of shiny-new coasters. Yay?

If you run a full Linux distribution on your desktop or laptop, you might have wished for a faster, lighter system when you did not need all the functionality. SliTaz might be the solution. I’ve been able to perform a frugal setup of this tiny distro with Ubuntu, without a dedicated partition.

Normally, I’d recommend Damn Small Linux. I recently discovered SliTaz and found it to be

1. lighter (28mb instead of 50mb)
2. more modern (runs Linux kernel 2.6 instead of 2.4)
3. easier to set up (just two files to copy)

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