The FIGGIT button

When you post a message to some mailing list asking a FAQ for the Nth time, the best it could happen is someone redirecting you to archives, possibly scanned through a google search.

Since the habit of _not_ searching for the very same stuff in google is getting worse each day, someone decided to create a "google evangelism" page...

I found it so hilarious that I decided to have an easier access to it by creating a button in my firefox toolbar.

If you want one as well, just drag and drop this FIGGIT link to yours...

Births time...

wow, it is already three months since my last post

A lot of things happened in the meanwhile, and especially November was a really "busy" month, seeing the birth of Fedora 8 (Werewolf), which I am happily using to write this, and my second son Giulio :)

Time flies when you are having fun...

Stability matters

As a followup to my previous post, after the last firmware upgrade (claiminig again an "improved stability" in the changelog), I started experiencing regular disconnections, both from the WiFi and from the ADSL line. So, on August 12 I decided enough was enough and reconnected my old router (Linksys WAG200G).

Here is my provider connections log:



In the last five days I used the SX763 it disconnected more than 20 times, now I am STILL running the connection started at about 0:30:00 !!!

Dear Siemens, please take note...

Siemens SX763

I decided to try using VoIP at home and ended up buying a Siemens SX763 ADSL router to replace my trustworthy Linksys WAG200G.

Soon, I realized that something was really broken, because the router kept rebooting itself every few minutes: a quick google search shown I was not alone. Moreover, VoIP calls systematically dropped after 3:32 (see image) so I was quite disappointed and ready to throw away the new router...



Then a new firmware come out, supposedly fixing the VoIP issue so I installed it and... nothing changed. Fortunately I found in a german forum on the Siemens website that the README for the firmware update "forgot" to mention I had to perform a reset to factory defaults after the update: at least now VoIP is working.

On the other end, stability did not improve too much; look for example at my ADSL connection logs:



Where the longest connections are when I reattached the Linksys router... I was ready (again) to throw away the new router, when I discovered another update (2.1.34.7.0): I wonder if they read my mind...

I hope this fixes the stability issues, otherwise I'm not sure I will wait for the next firmware release

They made it... Moonshine

Fedora 7 was announced today, and it is really a pleasure to see they really managed to make it (somewhat) respecting the planned schedule.
I must admit I was a bit skeptical because the biggest planned feature, the merge of the former Core with Extras, was not effective one month ago, after F7 test4 already come out (note in the past there were only three test releases); look what Will Woods, Fedora QA leader, said in a post on fedora-test list:

So, Koji is our new build system, which we set up after F7t4. You can
check it out here:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji

(Yes, we replaced the entire build system for Fedora, just 3 weeks
before the release of F7. Yes, we are a little bit crazy. But we said we
would merge Core and Extras and get a release out by May 31 and by God,
we did.)

Making suspend (and hibernate) just work

Richard Hughes announced in fedora-devel-list a really interesting new feature will be included in the upcoming Fedora 7. Quoting from the mail:

New in Fedora 7 we have the new pm-utils and hal-info dmi based matching
of suspend quirks. We are doing finer matching to the laptop make and
model, to make suspend (and more importantly resume) work for more
people.

What this means:

* Some machines that suspended in FC6 might not work in F7
* Lots of machines that did not suspend in FC6 might work in F7

So, if you have to edit a file or add stuff to grub to get suspend
working in F7, that's a bug. This stuff should just work on the majority
or laptops.

So we now have all the pieces to get a realiable suspend/hibernate feature. What is still needed is a lot of contributors for new rules: if you feel like help ensuring your particular laptop can supend/hibernate (and even more importantly resume) properly, have a look at the linked site.

Finally some LIBERATION for fonts?

One of the most annoying things on Linux was the default set of fonts. More specifically, there was nothing comparable with the usual (and ubiquitus) fonts found on Windows like Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
Web pages, documents from MS office and everything polluted with those fonts were not properly rendering in the Linux applications.

Now, Red Hat decided to do something to fix this and released a first version of a set of fonts with the same metric, so that a replacementis perfectly usable.

For more info on the press release

Update:
the package review request was just completed. Expect to find them with a "yum install liberation-fonts" real soon now