Author: Fredrik Rambris

Gentoo Linux

I evaluated all tree major BSDs and would have gone with FreeBSD if it wasn’t for me being so used to Linux and that I couldn’t get it to run fully on my hardware. So I chose what seemed to be the closest Linux distro, Gentoo Linux. I maybe give FreeBSD another round some time in the future. When I separate my firewall (modem-ppp-internet) and server (file and web) from other stuff like jukebox I will probably go with OpenBSD for the firewall. pf seems really nice.

If all this seems to be excuses they are. I would really like to have most of the functionality I have on my Linux workstation but with a BSD. If I get filthy rich I might go for a Mac (as well).

I now run

XFree86 4.3.0
I will look into X.org someday if it supports nVidias drivers and my Wacom table
GNOME 2.6
I really recommend an upgrade. It looks a little better, has nicer features. I run the SmoothGNOME theme (except for the icons). Be sure to apply this patch to gtk-smooth-engine 0.5.6 if you use GTK 2.4 or later
Kernel 2.4.25 + Gentoo patches
I tried to get 2.6.4, 2.6.5 and 2.6.6 to run but X hung a lot and I couldn’t find what was causing it so I gave up and reverted to 2.4 (and installed ALSA).

… and more.

FreeBSD

I’ve started trying FreeBSD. It seems nice and is less hyped than Linux. Also I know my way around Linux, FreeBSD is a new challenge. If all of my hardware is supported odds are that I depenguinize (manually by reinstalling it) my Linux boxen. I run Red Hat Linux 9 on it now and after looking around for another distro trying Debian, Gentoo and Mandrake Linux, Gentoo was the one I liked the most. After learning that it used some concepts of BSD I gave the three free BSDs a go. FreeBSD was the one I found to my liking so I am now giving 5.2 a beating. I hope it goes well because I’d much more like running FreeBSD than some dead hat distro.

Release!

As I’ve yet again grown tired of gfxindex I’ve decided to release it in it’s current condition. It is largely rewritten, much more modular now and it’s reusing more code now. It should work mostly nice. It lacks documentation and only reads JPEG and PNG. However some major new features have been put in:

  • Dependency of X removed
  • It creates thumbnails much faster now due to using the built in scaling of libjpeg. This prescales the thumbnail by skipping data before decoding. Results are still almost as good as reading in the whole image and then scale it
  • Thumbnails are scaled using weighted scaling giving a smooth look to them
  • The index can be much more customized
  • The index caching is gone, it’s however still rather fast to read in the images’ properties
  • Availability for Windows

Winbuild

smyge-vinter3-150x144

The GLib dependency has been removed. The only libraries it requires to build now is jpeglib (for obvious reasons), popt (to parse command line arguments).

I have now managed to cross-compile it for Windows (using the MinGW branch of GCC). I had to tweak popt to get it to build. If it gives me trouble I will remove the popt dependency as well.

To the right here you can see a thumbnail that has been generated with the new gfxindex.