Vista RC1
16. September 2006
After registering at microsoft and downloading Vista RC1 yesterday (2,5 GB) I decided to give it a try today. I had not installed Windows on my Notebook after my harddisk died last time but had left 10 GB free space in the partition table.
Installation
After booting up from the DVD and waiting some time a complete graphical installation wizards starts. You have to fill out your language, your Key and accept the license agreement. There are two installation modes, “Update” and “Expert”. “Update” was not availible as I did not start the installation out of Windows. In Expert mode you have exactly one choice, the partition information. There is an fdisk front-end that looks quite good though it does not know about linux partition types and gave me a bad error trying to format a linux partition with ntfs. Anyway, after deleting my spare partition and letting it create it’s own one, Vista was installed without demanging my other linux partitions while overriding grub.
Two reboots are necessary until the installation is finished, after the first you can enter your username and choose the background picture.
Hardware
As expected, anything worked out of the box like it did with dapper. I have a Centrino notebook which has no special hardware.
– The WLAN drivers seem to be better in Windows because they connect faster. I hope this will improve in Edgy
– Suspend to RAM is also faster on Windows
Software
There is lot of stuff preinstalled I would rather not need, like Media Center. The new Internet Explorer looks interesting but I immediately downloaded Firefox 2.0 Beta which works very good, too. All in all, Windows looks very media centered and wants to lead you to buy DRM-stuff very often.
The “Run…” field in the menu has been replaced with something which is more or less simular to the Deskbar-applet in Gnome.
Look and Feel
If there is some bling in Vista, it seems to be disabled with my graphic hardware. I really look forward to AIXGL in Edgy which hopefully supports my hardware.
The default theme looks much cooler as the ugly used in Windows XP. IMHO Gnome should also use a better default theme, maybe even parts of this suggestion.
Conclusion
I am a bit disappointed so far. I had expected that they would include really cool features in Vista which would really make me think about switchting back to Windows but they did not. There is nothing with is not also availible in Ubuntu Dapper.
jhs vs. m4 1:1
14. September 2006
More or less the whole day I improved the gtkmm patch to be able to build without the Atkmm api which is particular usefull on platforms like Maemo.
I had to fight a lot with m4, perl and the bad error messages of the C preprocessor. It only tells you that some #ifdef was not closed but it does not really mention where. After I finally also got the conditional building using automake/autoconf working, the updated patch is now in bugzilla.
Yet anther Glom bug!
8. September 2006
Today, I made a patch for Bug #349358. The patch itself is quite trivial but I took me some time to find out why all this happens.
In the meantime im trying to fill my brain with stuff related to production engineering for my exam on monday. There are just 300 pages left I have to learn by rote, so it might become a very funny weekend.
Hello Planet Gnome!
7. September 2006
So I am finally here! For those who do not know me, I am a maintainer of Anjuta and work for Murray Cumming’s company Openismus on several GTK/GNOME related things.
Today, I created a new patch for #346896. I have to thank Dodji for his tips and apoligize that it was not at all a gtksourceviewmm problem. I have attached a screenshot for those who need some bling!
GtkSourceViewmm issues
6. September 2006
I am currently trying to fix Bug 436896 but encountered that gtksourceviewmm has a problem with SourceView::get_source_buffer() because this always fails. I will have to fix that first before I can go on because there is no other way to set the SourceLanguage
Finally, the patch is here!
29. August 2006
The “–enable-api-atk=no” patch for gtkmm and glibmm was finished today. I hope this will make things easier on platfroms were atk does not really make sense like maemo. If you want to test it check out the patches in Bugzilla.