Back to Ubuntu (6.06) – Fedora Core 5 sucks

 Linux, Ubuntu  9 Responses »
May 202006
 

I’ve gone back to Ubuntu. I’m convinced that Ubuntu is the best Linux distro in the world for desktops and laptops. After battling with Fedora Core 5 for a month or so I’m 100% convinced of this. Here’s why:

  • Suspend to RAM in Fedora Core never worked correctly, even with the Suspend 2 kernel.
  • Suspend to disk worked most of the time, but sometimes failed.
  • Fedora did not support the IPW2200 series wireless card out of the box.
  • Fedora’s installation now uses logical volumes, which caused major headaches with other distros.
  • Fedora’s configuration made it difficult to control certain things such as GDM control. Furthermore, it didn’t have any support for 915resolution or 855resolution.

There are other things as well, but most of the major pains are these. Ubuntu 6.06 flight 7 worked fine for all of these directly out of the box, with NO configuration (except 915resolution, which I’m used to now).

Ubuntu 6.06 has a great look and feel. It is snappy and responsive and just plain works. Plus, DRI is now working perfectly and I can use OpenGL again. Plus, suspend works great even with DRI enabled, this is great news.

Lastly, I did manage to get the VGA out working in Ubuntu and I’m pretty sure it will work the same in FC5, but I’m never going back again. I’ll put the directions in a separate post.

Is your browser requesting a page twice?

 Java, Tech  118 Responses »
May 022006
 

For the initial release of Naymz, Michele Lopatin and I have been tracking down a bug that was causing the browser to fetch the same URL twice. In order to track this down I had to systematically comment out lines of HTML in the page until it stopped and then uncomment lines until it came back to figure out exact what was requesting the page the second time. This was a huge issue because it essentially doubled the load on the server and the bandwidth usage.

As it turns out in FireFox (and possibly IE, but I’m not sure as I run Linux completely now), empty image src attributes cause the browser to request the same URL of the current page the browser is pointing to. This is really DUMB on the FireFox developers (or the W3C if it is in the specification) part since this should just error out:

<img src=””/>

Instead they decided to try requesting the URL of the current page again in hopes that it would magically return an image, which of course it is never really gonna do because the current URL is what your are rendering. Lame. At least we figured it out before launching and getting pounded with double requests.