I found a map of WLANs in Linz. (I live in the middle-left, by the river.) I think I’ve picked up this guy’s WLAN from across the water.

I’m not just playing with this wireless stuff. I am using the moments of connectivity to prune the gtkmm bug list a bit.

garnome

I noticed that wget works through proxies, so I tried out GARNOME for the first time in a while. This is probably a good idea, because it’s an important de-facto part of our release process. I had more success than the last time, but hit the RedHat 9 bonobo-activation problem.

RedHat 9

Maybe I had forgotten what a default RedHat was like before I’d messed it up by installing a development GNOME on top of it. Other than a few oddities here and there it really does seem like a very usable desktop system. It’s certainly no more difficult than a standard Windows desktop, and it’s a lot simpler. Every now and then I look at KDE, most recently on SUSE 8.1, and I find it ridiculously cluttered, as if someone thought the Windows people knew what they were doing. It’s nice to see GNOME and RedHat use the old prove-by-doing principle.

I explored the underlying RedHat network scripts a bit and realised that lots of this underlying stuff is a bit heath robinson. But it does work very well, and seems to be well understood. I don’t know how the not-yet-part-of-GNOME GNOME System Tools compare, or whether this is similar on other distros.