As what as you like

• May 30, 2008

  0.9 loose feature freeze

  The tabs feature is in. drag&dropping terminals is in. For bonus points we’ve even thrown in a branch that lets you quickly hide all the terminals apart from one (I’m experimentally calling this “terminal zooming”). So that’s it for new features for 0.9 and apart from fixing bugs we are now only tweaking the existing features to get them right. In the next week or so I’ll declare a string freeze and get a translation template up so our fantastic translators can get to work while we take care of the final bugs. Right after that, a glorious 0.9 will roll out of the door and into a tarball/PPA/Intrepid near you!

• May 22, 2008

  A good day

  After learning to use Meld and much chatting with chantra, I’m pleased to announce that we have landed his dnd-tabs branch into Terminator trunk. What does all of that mean? Well, it means that we are a major step closer to being able to release 0.9 (which I have arbitrarily decided should be released only when we have tab support). That’s not to say that the release will be today or even in the next week - the branch landing may bring us all the infrastructure we need, but it needs some UI and behaviour love to make sure people don’t get lost in a maze of nested tabs (although this seems like such a powerful feature for some users that it may well be available as an option). This is the sort of thing I want to avoid out of the box: One other nice thing we get from chantra’s branch is drag&drop re-ordering of terminals. You can kind of see it at work in the screenshot below - we highlight the area of the window where the terminal being dragged will end up (note that you can’t see the mouse pointer - it should be over the grey square with a drag icon of a terminal): Thanks very much to chantra for his hard work on this, and indeed all of the team who have been rocking trunk for weeks now. We’ll get this polished and fixed ASAP and into a tarball/PPA and hopefully into things like Fedora and OpenSUSE :)

• May 21, 2008

  Further Terminator Progress

  It’s a month since my last news item and since it’s also now almost a month since Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) was released, work has picked up again on Terminator. We’re landing lots of fixes and architectural tweaks all the time, with a few features slipping in there too.

  There’s no firm deadline for 0.9 yet, but tabs is still the main blocking feature (drag&drop terminal arranging will be included free with that, which is extremely nice). The team continues to grow, and we’re getting more and more blog coverage. Thanks to everyone involved!

• May 20, 2008

  Let's be perfectly clear here...

  Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult. It’s utterly outrageous that we have a law which supposedly prevents individuals from expressing their opinion. 3. A system of intense religious veneration of a particularperson, idea, or object, especially one consideredspurious or irrational by traditional religious bodies;as, the Moonie cult.[PJC] even if you don’t like that, there’s: 2. A system of religious belief and worship.[1913 Webster] so that covers every religion as a cult. As for dangerous - they have a well documented history of legal threats, intimidating behaviour, etc. Update: It seems that sanity is not lost and the guy isn’t going to be prosecuted because, as should have been fairly obvious, his sign wasn’t inciting anything \o/

• Apr 20, 2008

  A couple of X300 tidbits...

  … neither of them good. First off, in a stunning piece of fail, Lenovo have used a drive from one of the few manufacturers that enforces region coding on DVDs in hardware - Matshita, aka Matsushita, aka Panasonic. This is very frustrating and made worse by the drive shipping in a state with no region code set, so no DVDs at all will play. I now either have the choice of changing it no more than 5 times, or risking the drive with some custom firmware which claims to remove the region code. Secondly, and more worryingly, there is a new BIOS release for the X300, but one report from a Linux user thus far suggests that the machine has started hard locking. I can’t confirm because this machine is far too important to me (ie I use it for work), so I am holding back on the update until I know what’s going on. Update It occurred to me that it might be useful to document how I changed the region code - install regionset and run it. It will show you your current region code (0xFF for me, ie region 0) and how many changes you have left, then ask if you want to change it. Second update Lenovo actually withdrew the BIOS update, so clearly something was wrong with it. This page lists the models for which they have pushed out a fixed version. The X300 is currently still listed as “Coming Soon” :(