Monday, August 11, 2003

Fun with XFree86 -- 3:16 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There is a bug in the way that XFree86 4.3 does underlining which means that Mozilla builds without XFT support cannot properly underline links. The only solution? Make a minor change to one file and recompile all of XFree. Rah! Thankfully, Slackware made it easier than I expected it to be. Basically what I did is this:

1. Downloaded the /xfree source directory from my favorite local Slackware mirror.
2. Untarred the X430src-1.tar.bz2 tarball and backed up the original in another directory.
3. Edited the file mentioned in this Mozilla Bugzilla entry. I did it by hand since it only meant adding two characters.
4. Make a fresh bzip2 tarball via tar cvf X430src-1.tar xc/ and bzip2 X430src-1.tar
5. Copied my new tarball to the /xfree directory and ran XFree86.build
6. Wait
7. Once the script was done I reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers, went to /etc/X11/xinit and made the necessary symbolic link thusly: ln -s xinitrc.kde xinitrc, and ran startx
8. The only thing I had to do beside that is reinstall my TrueType fonts in KDE's font installer.

So far, everything seems to be working and the links are properly underlined now. I've stopped using the XFT build because there seems to be a kind of nasty memory leak (or something) that severely degrades performance if the program is running for more than a few hours.

Hordes of the Underdark Info -- 10:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespy managed to get a few details about Hordes of the Underdark, the upcoming second expansion for Neverwinter Nights. The game will focus around the drow (*the crowd cheers*) and will be for higher level characters, enabling your character to get up to 30th level. Thanks Blue's News.

Sunday, August 10, 2003

Laser Goodness -- 8:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've wanted a laser printer for a long time. I'm really sick of sinking money into inkjet cartridges. I just happened to be looking at the Samsung ML-17xx printers yesterday and saw that they even come with a Linux driver! Whilst perusing the Best Buy (no affiliation, yadda, yadda) ad this morning, I saw that they had the ML-1710 for $99 after rebate. Talk about a steal. It is mine.

My only gripes with the printer are that it doesn't come with a USB cable, it only comes with a 1000 page "starter" cartridge, and I have to load up their driver configuration app to print something on legal paper (thankfully, I only do that once a week).

Other than those minor quibbles, I really like it. At $99, the printer is basically free since I won't be buying ink for a long time. Installation was a snap. I mounted their CD, did the old sh /mnt/cdrom/setup.sh routine, then ran linux-config to add the printer (which it automatically detected). Print test page. Done. I've never had an easier time setting a device in Linux. I fired up OpenOffice.org's spadmin and pointed it to the PPD file for the printer and I was printing in no time. I'm using the Apple LaserWriter Pro 630 driver in WordPerfect 8 for Linux on the advice of this guy. It works great.

There is some banding on it when printing complex graphics, but the only graphics I print often are clip art which aren't affected. Text is nice and crisp and prints lightning fast. Color me sold.

UPDATE! After a reboot, now a window comes up everytime I send a print job to the printer so I can adjust any settings (including paper size) that I want. Cool. Why can't more companies support Linux like this?

Past Two Days' News

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