Remus

Among other things today was the day when I recovered a lost soul. A friend of
mine told me once how sick is of Windows and all the problems he have with it.
In one of it’s visit he noticed that what we are running doesn’t look like
Windows, he was shocked to find that there are other OS’es available.

So today we installed Mandrake 8 on his
computer. I don’t know if he will manage to resist the big switch (if he
manages to hold on for two weeks he won’t switch back). But to be honest
doesn’t even matter if he will remain with Linux or not, what matters is that
he now knows that there are alternatives and that is what matters. BTW, he is a
small business owner and he is quite committed to switch all his computers from
Windows to Linux.

There where a couple of funny things in his reaction when we installed it.
First he didn’t really understand how is possible to only allocate 8 G of space
for an OS and don’t worry about future applications. Well it’s amazing how
much can go in 8Gigs and how much space will still be available ;). Also after
playing with all the window managers and all the applications (well not quite
with all) he was wandering how can Microsoft make money selling that crap when
there is this piece of software which is so “easy to install” and so “sweet”
(his words 🙂 . Well, Linux wasn’t always
like that, I just remember 98 or 99 when I was trying to install Debian for the first time, and after a whole week
I still didn’t manage to get all those dependencies right and I switched to Slackware.

I was playing with “HyperPad” and in about one hour I made it to use antialiased fonts, it looks cool, do the antialiasing is a bit strong and it’s quite unpleasant in time. Anyway it looks a lot nicer, strange how ugly the fonts can be in Java under Linux. Also managed to solve the SkinLF bug, now if any skin it’s used the backspace key in the editor works. I had to set the look and feel first and then create the widgets. It is a funny bug, I still can’t figure why if you set the look and feel after the components are created the backspace and back cursor keys won’t work.

Another not quite funny thing happened today, while switching from xemacs to xterm to make a clean build, I noticed the the build went extremely fast, when to start the application it failed. All the source files where deleted, the source directory was clean with the subdirectories still there but no file in them. No delete command was issued, just disappeared. It happened before (once) a couple of months,, but that time I was blaming it on Quanta (it was a beta version, and I was working around importing files into a project) but this time was no Quanta around. Must be something with reiserfs. Probably I should do a kernel upgrade! Anyway happily no harm was done (this time) as I had the fresh files in emacs and the sources where in the CVS, I’m lucky enough to do commits often 😉