Rawstudio 1.1 Released

Rawstudio 1.1 was released today. I compiled it today and so far the only noticeable difference is exif support. I'll report on it more later if I find anything else. There isn't an announcement up yet on the website but it is on the mailing list.

Xorg 7.4 Review

Xorg 7.4 was released recently although the biggest features touted for this version, namely DRI2 and randr 1.3 were dropped from this release. Despite this there have been significant improvements. This is the first release for me that actually displays acceptable performance using the EXA acceleration extension with the Intel driver. This means I can use XV to for accelerated video rendering with Compiz. Before this was only possible using a patch for mplayer and a special plugin for Compiz. This was not a great solution though because no other players worked with this plugin, which meant no Totem, Xine, or even Gnome-Mplayer which also did not work correctly. I've also noticed that Blender works much better now with Compiz. It no longer flickers uncontrollably.

So for the only regressions I have experienced is a slower recovery from suspend and some minor artifacting on my Gnome Panel applets. The artifacts seem to go away when mousing over. Despite these minor regressions I think it is a good upgrade for anyone using the Intel driver. If you're anything like me you've been waiting a long time for a proper Intel EXA implementation to accelerate video while using Compiz or another compositing window manager.

Meanwhile Intel has announced that they want a release of xorg server 1.6 before the year is out. This release should include DRI2 using GEM and randr 1.3. Knowing the history of Xorg release schedules I have my doubts about getting 1.6 out that quickly but the latest Xorg has pacified me for now.

Evolution-RSS SVN Ebuild

Ok so I haven't been able to get it to build yet but I am working on an evolution-rss svn ebuild. My main impetus for this ebuild has been the fact that I filed a bug a week or two ago about the appearance of feeds when using a dark theme and it is now apparently resolved in svn. This and the lack of a dbus connection are my two biggest gripes with evolution-rss. The theme bug is the classic "light text on white background" issue that seems to plague dark themes. I'm looking forward to GNOME 2.24 because they have been working on dark theme integration. Hopefully this will create a much more usable dark theme environment. Maybe I'll be lucky and a new version of evolution-rss will be released for the new evolution and I won't have to fiddle with this ebuild any more. If I do get it to work before a new version is released I will be sure to share it here.

Buffer Overflow in Gnome-Panel?

I upgraded to Gnome 2.22 recently as it has gone stable in Gentoo's portage. One issue I encountered was that the panel would crash whenever I clicked on the clock applet. Investigating futher I checked my logs and found that it was crashing due to SSP. I never had this problem with previous versions of Gnome Panel. Anyhow I disabled SSP and it works fine now but I worry that a bug has been introduced into the latest stable release of the panel.

Google Chrome

Of course just as I post about Web 2.0 browsers Google releases their own take on a Web 2.0 capable browser, Chrome, based on the Webkit rendering engine but with a whole new JS engine called V8. Too bad It isn't available for Linux. I would love to test its apparent speed. From reports posted online it is about twice as fast as the current Gecko JS engine. I wonder how well it performs vs Squirrelfish and how well it will perfrom vs Tracemonkey.

This announcement only confirms my belief that Webkit and Gecko will be the future of Web 2.0. With Chrome Webkit will be firmly entrenched in the Web 2.0 discussion if it fairs as well as most Google technologies. Gecko will also continue to be a part of the discussion because of their Tracemonkey JS engine and because Firefox extensions and technologies like Mozilla Prism have the ability to replicate and build on what Chrome achieves.

Rawstudio 1.1 Released

Rawstudio 1.1 was released today. I compiled it today and so far the only noticeable difference is exif support. I'll report on it more later if I find anything else. There isn't an announcement up yet on the website but it is on the mailing list.

Xorg 7.4 Review

Xorg 7.4 was released recently although the biggest features touted for this version, namely DRI2 and randr 1.3 were dropped from this release. Despite this there have been significant improvements. This is the first release for me that actually displays acceptable performance using the EXA acceleration extension with the Intel driver. This means I can use XV to for accelerated video rendering with Compiz. Before this was only possible using a patch for mplayer and a special plugin for Compiz. This was not a great solution though because no other players worked with this plugin, which meant no Totem, Xine, or even Gnome-Mplayer which also did not work correctly. I've also noticed that Blender works much better now with Compiz. It no longer flickers uncontrollably.

So for the only regressions I have experienced is a slower recovery from suspend and some minor artifacting on my Gnome Panel applets. The artifacts seem to go away when mousing over. Despite these minor regressions I think it is a good upgrade for anyone using the Intel driver. If you're anything like me you've been waiting a long time for a proper Intel EXA implementation to accelerate video while using Compiz or another compositing window manager.

Meanwhile Intel has announced that they want a release of xorg server 1.6 before the year is out. This release should include DRI2 using GEM and randr 1.3. Knowing the history of Xorg release schedules I have my doubts about getting 1.6 out that quickly but the latest Xorg has pacified me for now.

Evolution-RSS SVN Ebuild

Ok so I haven't been able to get it to build yet but I am working on an evolution-rss svn ebuild. My main impetus for this ebuild has been the fact that I filed a bug a week or two ago about the appearance of feeds when using a dark theme and it is now apparently resolved in svn. This and the lack of a dbus connection are my two biggest gripes with evolution-rss. The theme bug is the classic "light text on white background" issue that seems to plague dark themes. I'm looking forward to GNOME 2.24 because they have been working on dark theme integration. Hopefully this will create a much more usable dark theme environment. Maybe I'll be lucky and a new version of evolution-rss will be released for the new evolution and I won't have to fiddle with this ebuild any more. If I do get it to work before a new version is released I will be sure to share it here.

Buffer Overflow in Gnome-Panel?

I upgraded to Gnome 2.22 recently as it has gone stable in Gentoo's portage. One issue I encountered was that the panel would crash whenever I clicked on the clock applet. Investigating futher I checked my logs and found that it was crashing due to SSP. I never had this problem with previous versions of Gnome Panel. Anyhow I disabled SSP and it works fine now but I worry that a bug has been introduced into the latest stable release of the panel.

Google Chrome

Of course just as I post about Web 2.0 browsers Google releases their own take on a Web 2.0 capable browser, Chrome, based on the Webkit rendering engine but with a whole new JS engine called V8. Too bad It isn't available for Linux. I would love to test its apparent speed. From reports posted online it is about twice as fast as the current Gecko JS engine. I wonder how well it performs vs Squirrelfish and how well it will perfrom vs Tracemonkey.

This announcement only confirms my belief that Webkit and Gecko will be the future of Web 2.0. With Chrome Webkit will be firmly entrenched in the Web 2.0 discussion if it fairs as well as most Google technologies. Gecko will also continue to be a part of the discussion because of their Tracemonkey JS engine and because Firefox extensions and technologies like Mozilla Prism have the ability to replicate and build on what Chrome achieves.