Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

One of the most annoying issues with Linux’s graphical system (and any UN*X), is that if you have some keys setup for switching the keyboard layout – when using two or more keyboard layouts, such as for writing English and Hebrew – then that key combination cannot be used in any other keyboard shortcut.

Its most annoyingly present when setting the keyboard layout switching command to ALT+SHIFT (like in MS-Windows), then you can’t do any keyboard shortcut that has ALT+SHIFT in it – such as ALT+SHIFT+TAB to move to the previous window.

Well, finally there is a solution! As detailed in FreeDesktop.org’s Bugzilla and Ubuntu’s Launchpad , and thanks to Ilya Murav’jov we now have a patch to solve this ancient X11 problem.

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From a discussion about anti-virus for Android:

sorry, but your wrong. Linux can’t run executables. I am a Linux administrator.

Source

Well, they don’t work for me – haven’t worked since Firefox 2, I think.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then its about the ability of web pages to define keyboard shortcuts to access and enable features on the web page using the keyboard instead of the mouse. Common actions are to focus text edit boxes or to trigger links directly.

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Its that time of the year again, and we are back in Linux release season. The usual suspects are all here again except for openSUSE who moved to a funky 8-month~year release cycle (I’m not sure they know what release schedule they’re using).

I’ve been testing the pre-releases of Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 (haven’t had a chance to test Mandriva 2009.1 which is a shame because I used to really like Mandriva) and my impressions are as follows:

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Or so the article on The Register goes. Aside from populist titling, this story actually demonstrates what hurdles Linux has to go through in order to be accepted as a Desktop Operating System, and considering the size of the task I might as well retract my stand on the subject – yes, Linux is not yet ready as a Desktop OS for the general populace.

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Quite the contrary it seams: Adobe to release Flash 64bit first on Linux. True it is only the beta version, and the MS-Windows and Mac OS-X 64bit versions will follow shortly¹, but still this demonstrates some serious commitment to Linux as an equal player in the desktop operating system market!

All we need now is Photoshop for Linux and we’re set 🙂

Installing the 64Bit flash plugin for Linux is painless although requires some command line experience:
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1. i.e. its been almost two weeks since the Linux release and there is no Windows version yet [↩]

Another post just to get some information out there on Google – there is a known bug in Evolution regarding receiving meeting invitations from MS-Outlook 2003 clients, and several Google searches didn’t come up with the solution, so here is the problem and the workaround:

A default Evolution installation has problems with meeting invitations from MS-Outlook 2003 – when such an invitation is received, it is shown as a plain text message like this:

And you can’t take any action on the email. (more…)

As noted below, Fedora 9 came out recently, and I think its time my work computer would get a “brain transplant”. I can’t have a lot of downtime on this machine – its the one I do most of my work on, so this upgrade needs to be a “live updated” – I can’t afford the time to shut it down, load an installation of even a live CD (that doesn’t have my environment) and wait until it installs.

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כמו כל שנה באפריל ובאוקטובר.
כדי “לחגוג” את המאורע הנה שני מונים לשחרור של גרסות הלינוקס שאני הכי משתמש בהן היום (וספציפית בגרסאות העומדות לפני שחרור):

מנדריבה, שזו הפצה אחרת שאני מחבב – אם כי לא יצא לי להשתמש בה לאחרונה – כבר שיחררה גרסה אביבית.

עדכון [25.4]: אובונטו החדשה שוחררה, ובאיחור של רק יומיים ניסיתי להריץ שדרוג במחשב הביתי שמריץ עדיין 7.10 (לא מסובך – מנהל העדכונים כבר צריך להתחיל להציק לכם, תפעילו אותו ותלחצו על כפתור ה-upgrade למעלה. שדרוג של פדורה הולך להיות הרבה פחות נעים), וזה לא נראה שזה מתקדם לאן שהוא – השרתים של אובנטו בטח מפוצצים כי תהליך השדרוג לא מצליח להוריד אפילו את רשימות העדכונים, שלא לדבר על החבילות עצמן.

עדכון נוסף: הצלחתי להגיע לשלב העדכון של אובנטו בו מנהל העדכון מודיע מה הוא הולך לעשות וכמה זמן זה יקח. שימו לב לתמונה הבאה:
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I’ve been using VirtualBox 1.5 to run MS-Windows guest virtual machines under my Linux operating system (Fedora 8 and Ubuntu) for some QA and stuff like that. This post is a summary of my experience with this virtualization solution, mostly so I won’t forget the details, and as such is expected to be updated from time to time.

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