Year: 2003

2003-08-21

Apart from the regular staff in the office, I managed to find some time to play with the KDE from Red Hat Linux 9. It’s been a while since I devoted some time to introduce myself to the progress of window/desktop managers.

This time I am even more impressed then the last time. Huge progress has been made in terms of stability and usability. Everything looks tightly integrated. Everything just works. Fonts are nice. I am not usually very picky about fonts, but I cannot leave fonts unnoticed this time. Aliasing looks good even on my crapy monitor.

Another impressing thing is the “Other” menu, which contains staff from education KDE package and some ‘other’ programs. A bunch of useful enough programs, which you will never spend the time on looking for, include KStars for stars database with nice interface and lots of data. KTouch – touch-typing training program. Few programs aimed at helping the user to learn the foreign language: flash cards (like their paper grandma’s used in high school), correct word spelling game, Spanish verbs training program and few others. Those, who are not keen on languages, can “play” mathematics. Like a program, which trains you to calculate percentages fast. More, more, and more.

Bravo goes to the KDE team!

2003-08-20

Today I’ve upgraded my workstation (the one in the office) to Red Hat Linux 9. It had 8.0 until now. The process itself was mostly painless until, for some strange reason, /etc/fstab was modified by installation to use partition LABELs instead of device names. I’ve seen it before and it was rather easy to fix.

First impressions are rather positive. Machine is somewhat more responsive at times under load then it used to. Not always though, but still an improvement. A bunch of new mouse cursors look good in X. Fonts are really nice. Cyrillic settings got broken with the upgrade, but were easy to fix.

I’ve also switched from AfterStep to KDE for the time being. KDE is getting better by each time I try it. It is a well done, flexible, properly integrated and self-contained desktop manager. I’d guess tomorrow will be the themes day, though. :)

2003-08-19

Rather long and lazy day at work. Lots of people came from vacations, lots of people left for vacations. Plenty of discussions about our motherlang (Russia) and the state it finds itself being in. Rather depressing I must say.


Fast journey to Hazard’s place with Lev and Olga to redo yesterday’s attempt of “A Beautiful Mind” watching. This time it was successful. No wonder – DVDs don’t usually stop working in the middle. :)


Ice cream and somewhat strange movie about Cosa Nostra on TV in the evening…