HIV shown in great detail

Removal of hal improves boot time

I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.37, removed hal and KDE to 4.6 and experience improved boot times now.

Chromium and Firefox: a comparision

Well I have been a hard-core firefox fan for a long time. However, recently I have found some improvements on the chromium front, that are worthy of notice.

The battle started when Chromium started using Webkit and V8, one is a fast web page rendering engine and the other is a fast javascript engine. Firefox fell behind for some time; but those are old days. I shall just brief on some points of comparision between Firefox 3.6.13 and Chromium 9.0 on Arch linux x86_64.

Firefox:
- It is very stable. I have not seen it crash for over a year now.
- With AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant, I can easily get rid of ads as well as unwanted iframes, images etc.
- With Ghostery, I can easily get rid of tracking sited too.

Chromium:
- Its is stable for use but not as stable as Firefox.
- It does not work with a number of sites. I have been posting such sites since when it was in version 4. Even in recent versions (8.0 and 9.0) there still are sites that don't work well with it.
- It however works fine with those sites that are tailored to work with Internet Explorer and not on Mozilla Firefox.
- AdBlock or Ghostery are not completely supported on Chromium yet.

KDE 4.6 review

I was eagerly awaiting for kde 4.6 because I would be able to remove hal from my system after installeing it. So, as soon as kde 4.6 was available on Arch linux repositories, I got it installed. I was thrilled by some features and disappointed by some others. This review is about those.

Pros:
- The first thing I noticed was faster response. It spurred my interest in finding other improvements in kde 4.6 over previous versions. I do not know the reason why I am experiencing faster response; yet it is the best feature for me.

- Finally, KDE guys have done away with HAL. My other desktop environment, Enlightenment had switched to udisks, upower etc. So, I have been waiting for KDE to get rid of it.

- ksnapshot is improved. It is allowing two nice options:
     * hide mouse; and
     * hide window decoration.

KSnapshot

- KDE 4.6 has some delights in terms of graphics. The new wallpaper by Nuno is really cool. There are icons for compiled html files (chm) and also for portable compiled format(pcf) files. There is a new pointing cursor too.

Cons:
- I found a funny problem with knotes. I had saved a note as "typing <td>"; but it was transformed to "typing ".

- There are no icons for jpeg files yet. Neither are there any icons for deja vu(djvu) files.