Sports Illustrated published their collection of 100 greatest sports photos of all time. Â These mostly cover American sports, and not each one is as appealing to non-American viewers, but it’s definitely worth a watch. Â There are some really good ones.
Month: January 2013
Video : The art of pickpocketing
Dakar Rally 2013
Big Picture covers Dakar Rally 2013. Â Each of those fascinating images is precious. Â But they also work quite well together, telling the story of happiness and sadness, toughness, courage, technological advances, and most of all, good sportsmanship.
Upgrade to Fedora 18
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Fedora 18 has been released. Â And since now I have a somewhat flagman role for quite a few Fedora users around me, I took the courageous step of upgrading my personal laptop from Fedora 17 to 18. Â More or less it went smooth. Â Here are the notes for things that broke:
- As mentioned in the previous post, you should use “fedup –network 18” instead of “preupgrade“. Â This is my preferred way of upgrading, since I can still use the computer while the download and good chunk of the upgrade are being done.
- Broken KDE. Â Upon the first boot I got as far as the graphical login prompt. Â Upon entering the username and password, and selecting KDE as the preferred session, I’d get a KDE loader screen for a bit, then a few screen spasms, a black console, and eventually an automatic reset back to the graphical login prompt. Â That was ugly! Â I tried it a few times, but it was behaving consistently. Â Gnome however worked just fine. Â All I had to do to sort this out was install updates. Â But, there was a minor issue with that too – see the next one.
- No updates. Â Running “yum update” was consistently telling me that I have no updates to install. Â I found that difficult to believe, since I know for a fact that updates are available for Linux distributions pretty much the moment a new version is released. Â Solution to the problem is a reset of yum cache, by using “yum clean all”. Â Once that is done “yum update” will bring the usual megabytes of updates. Â KDE bits and pieces are in there too. Â Which sorted out the previous option.
- Google Chrome won’t start, spitting out an error of some missing library. Â That looked weird. Â Gladly, the solution is easy, and finding one is a single Google search away. Â Simply re-install the RPM and all will be back to normal.
- Git branch information in bash prompt was no more. Â Luckily, that was covered in the Release Notes. Â A necessary shell file has been moved from one location to another, so .bashrc should be updated.
So, is there anything good in this version that would counter the above issues? Â I don’t know, honestly, I haven’t been using it long enough yet. Â The things that I’ve noticed are:
- Some kind of a new behavior in the graphical login. Â There is a screensaver-like mode before the prompt that shows time and date. Â That’s convenient. Â But dragging that screen away with the mouse a la mobile/tablet interface, is not very productive.
- Dolphin file manager in KDE seems to be a lot more responsive. Â At least it starts now in split second. Â That was taking almost five seconds on the same machine before. Â Not that I use that often, but it’s handy.
- Gnome 3 polishing. Â When I briefly logged into it, I noticed better shadows and borders for windows, as well as some system monitoring widgets in the activities screen. Â That looked better than I remember it.
So far – not too much. Â Hopefully, more awesomeness will be discovered during the next few days.
Large numbers
Via xkcd.