nion's blog

Another time I have to write about proprietery software

Referring to phoronix there will be a new fglrx release (8.41) in a few weeks on which ATI worked for over a year now.
The cool thing is that it should raise your graphics performance on about 50% up to 90% depending on hardware and configuration. They rewrote the complete code base and 8.42 will finally support AIGLX.

Let's see if this will be true, People waited for a very long time on this, maybe it happens At the moment I use the radeon driver of Xorg, mainly because the 3d acceleration support is not really bad (well I can't play newer ego shooters, but Q3 and some simple OpenGL games work fine, 1700 fps on my radeon 9600 mobility), fglrx is proprietary and with every new kernel update it is always PITA to get the driver to work under the new kernel.

Opera released a 9.50 alpha version of their web browser.
It is available on: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/9.50-Alpha-1/.
One of the most important changes is a complete rewrite of the rendering engine but there are also others.

Here is a small feature show:



I really like this new feature to reopen closed windows, not only tabs (I am sure the firefox guys will create an extension for this soon, if there is none yet )
The idea about having a menu to open a site in any other browser you have installed is also very nice and somehow shows that they are at least aware of possible rendering problems in some sites (even if I had no problems for a long time

To get a detailed list of changes have a look at: http://cybernetnews.com/2007/09/03/cybernotes-exclusive-opera-95-features-video/ and a 4 days old article in the dev blog: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/08/31/focus-areas-during-kestrel-development.

Thanks to Joerg Jaspert and Frank Lichtenheld, the new packages.debian.org site looks way better and also seems to be really faster!

Just stumbled over google alerts which seems to be a nice service. You can search for specific keywords in the News, Web, News & Web and Groups section of google. If anything new is found for the search query you instantly get an email by google. Well, depending on what you configured, you are also able to configure it weekly or daily.

Nice new thingie by the google data octopus.