Linux is going great so far. Things are fast, customizable, and just the right amount of geeky. However, the other day I ran into a problem that really hinders my work flow on my laptop. It turns out that nvidia has some odd driver bug that prevents the video memory on your graphics card from being flushed and/or reorganized when you run out of memory and need more. This problem directly affects Beryl in that once you fill up your video ram every new window you open will be blank (black). It’s a recognized bug but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.
The main problem with this bug is that it forces you to change rendering mode in Beryl from pixmap to copy if you want to continue using it. Copy is much much much slower than pixmap. So you go from a fast/smooth user experience to a crippling crawl. We’ll see if I can’t work something out (Google is my friend) and get my laptop to a workable state with Beryl. On the good news side I’m now using Deluge to manage my torrents. It’s got a slick feature set and has a small memory footprint. Those two things are all you need for a background BT client.
I’ve also started using Scribus to do all of my poster layouts for various presentations and conferences. It’s cross platform so this isn’t exactly Linux news but not having real access to PowerPoint (I’m not going to layout a poster in openoffice) forced me to go looking. Scribus is the real deal. I’ve used Page-maker in the past and this beats it hands down. Everything is exactly where I think it should be in Scribus and the work-flow is extremely intuitive for me. This program is a great example of how and why people should choose their computing hardware and software to work the way they need it to and not how designers think people should work.
1 response so far ↓
Pat // February 27, 2007 at 10:23 am |
Imagine that – a specific program that works for the users and not the orinigal programmer. This I can sort of understand.