Arch Quickest in Publish to Package

I've been relatively busy lately, planning my trip and hanging out with all the friends I won't see during my month away, and I've fallen behind on the blogging. I apologize, but I'm not sorry =)

Just thought I'd post an interesting link today showing just how fantastic Arch Linux is. Because of it's rolling release model, Arch is always trying to hold in its repositories the newest release of any piece of software. Open Source Watershed has some numbers now on just how fast Arch is kept up to date in comparison to other distros, especially those that don't follow a rolling release.

Swiftweasel and Add-on Collections

I decided to move over to Swiftweasel for the majority of my web browsing needs. The performance boost given by the processor optimizations isn't very big but I'll try anything if it makes my system faster =P (Side Note: I chose Swiftweasel over Swiftfox because it's AUR package was up to date, while Swiftfox was still based on 3.0. They are essentially the same thing.)

Resizing Openbox Windows

Alt + Right Click resizes window! (At least in Openbox, I don't know about other window managers) This ground breaking revelation was shown to me by iggykoopa. Many thank yous, my man!

Greasemonkey

If you don't use it already, you've probably at least heard of the Firefox extension: Greasemonkey. Its a powerful tool that lets you use JavaScript to change the way webpages display.

Writeback Journalling

ext3 and ext4 have 3 ways of journalling data: writeback, ordered and journal modes. By default most distros use ordered. However in most cases writeback mode will give faster performance. So I'll show you how to switch over. Check out a more detailed explanation of these journalling options.

Firefox 3.5 Extensions

A few of my extensions are incompatible with the newest version of Firefox. So when I upgraded they got axed. Thankfully some have now returned or have been worked around.

Custom Kernel Update

So I've started the research phase of creating my own kernel. Going to do this nice and slow and try and get it right, the first time around. My goals are:

• Built in hardware support (eliminates need for initramfs during boot)
• Optimise for my hardware (and cut out everything else)

Germany, booting and Firefox 3.5

So, I'm pretty much all set for my trip to Germany at the end of the month. Yes, I'm going to spend nearly a month over seas! I'm so excited. The first couple weeks I'll be in Heidleberg brushing up on my German at the did deutsch-institut. The institut hooked me up with a (hopefully friendly) family for room and board while I study. After that, its off on my own for a couple weeks, exploring Germany. The flight is booked and today I just bought a handy travel guide: Let's Go Germany (on a budget). Flipping through it at Chapters, there's a ton of information on where to go, where to stay, what to do and how to save money. Cause travelling isn't cheap. And I'm on a student's budget. Still I think I'll be prepared by takeoff.