No, I’m not waiting for a call from a beautiful girl.. mainly because she won’t call me ever anyway. I’m waiting for two, or three, releases.
The first release is Amarok 1.4.1 (beta1) that should be the first test version of thew new version of Amarok, and I have to see if Gentoo is ready for it, after the lot of changes happened. The main thing that scares me is inotify support, as newer linux-headers aren’t present on ~x86 (nor on ~ppc fwiw). Should be fine in ~amd64 tho. If I was quick enough, the strict-aliasing fix will be present on that version, too 🙂
The second release is Dejavu Fonts that was due today. I want to see what they added, I’m always interested in new glyphs, also if I just use a little subset of them, because I think being able to see the text written in different encodings is important, especially for Free Software.
The third release is a bit of waiting, a bit of “I’d rather not see it coming” of Linux 2.6.17, as that it seems to have broken alsa-driver again, and I found no fix on upstream’s HG repos.
Now, of course I could have better things to do Sunday afternoon. I could be playing, I could be trying to find a way to see someone, I could be doing wood carving… but the only thing I’m able to do is to wait here for the new release, and in the mean time trying to fix a few things. Sigh. I would so much like to have a real life 😛
On a different note, thanks to Stuart in the graphics driver post’s comments, I’m now more oriented on a R200-based ATI card to get out of the binary drivers enslavement, as of that I can tell it works fine (some people told me radeon 7000 can have some quirks with video playing, and the amount of on-board memory scared, me a bit, 32MB aren’t much for videos). I found something that seems to be appropriate, and that I wouldn’t even categorise as “downgrade for freedom”, a radeon 9200 with 256MB of memory, that would be good for video playing with xv, but it’s not that cheap, about €50, almost the double of the other one, but probably comparing the prices this has an higher quality/price ratio. I still have to hear from anyone about the compatibility with xinerama, that is another of my major concerns. If someone uses that card with two monitors, please tell me how the support is 🙂
Depending of what other jobs I’m going to take next, I would be very very happy to spend that money to be more free than before.
Amarok-1.4.1 includes a runtime fallback for non-inotify systems, so building/running it on a system which doesn’t provide inotify shouldn’t be a problem at all.Also building it _with_ inotify and running it _without_ it should work.
So che non si dovrebbe ma a quest’ora di notte non mi va di scrivere in inglese. Ho più o meno lo stesso problema: il mio attuale computer ha quattro anni e mezzo giusti e i precedenti PC mi sono durati circa cinque anni, così ho cominciato a informarmi sullo stato dell’hardware corrente. La mia attuale scheda, una ATI 7500, funziona benissimo coi driver open source, e non essendo un giocatore non mi dà neppure problemi di prestazioni, però essendo AGP posso scordarmi di tenerla nella prossima scheda madre. Per ora, nel caso dovessi fare un acquisto immediato, punto anch’io su una 9200 (non 9250 se possibile, la 9250 costa di più e in realtà altro non è che una 9200 castrata), e dentro di me spero che il coso qui, che stando alle letture smart sull’hard disk ha superato le 21300 ore di funzionamento, regga il più a lungo possibile così che magari il driver r300 diventi più affidabile e mi possa arrischiare a prendere una 9500 o superiore…
If ya want a faster card with free drivers, the r300 driver covers any ATI card in r3xx or r4xx generations that isn’t an integrated graphics card. So that means anything X#, where # is less than 1000 — X850 XT or so being about the best.
I have a radeon 9000 pci, and I’m using free/libre drivers in xinerama mode “2560×1024” with xv and DRI, but I avoid launching 3D apps because it is a little bit unstable (at least back to xorg 7.0).I’ll try Xgl when I come back to France.I just had too much trouble with binary drivers 🙂