[KLUG Members] Mandrake 8.0 update

[Adam Tauno Williams]

># Eazel is a gorgeous piece of work. It would be a real shame if the 
>open-source community did not pick up the ball and at least keep it 
>maintained.

You mean Nautilus?  It is maintained.  There have been several
sub-releases.  It is a slightly leaner sow than before.

># Most of the eye-candy seems to have been buffed a little. The gradual 
>maturity of the software packages is evident. Abbrowser still looks somewhat 
>dowdy ... I am still looking for a Linux knock-off of Daytimer '98 ... but, 
>on the whole, things are moving along very nicely.

Evolution has a very nice calendar. gnomecal is functional and syncs
with Palm Pilots.  Supposedly Evolution does to,  but to enable that you
have to build from source..... Nah, I'll pass.

># VMware is broked. I will have to recompile the kernel before VMware will 
>compile its modules properly. I still need a copy of WIndows to access my 
>Bible / commentaries software.

Make sure you have the latest VMware, as it fixes various problems with
2.4.x kernels.  As for religion software how about the Sword project
(see www.freshmeat.net).

>IMHO _this_ is the distro for users looking to leave Windows(TM).

I'm still a RedHat man. :)
 
>At this point in time, I have only one reservation. There is some problem 
>with the fonts in the browsers. Some pages in each of the browsers I have 
>(Opera, Netscape Comm., Mozilla, Konqueror) render with a jumpy, broken 
>looking sort of font ... very difficult to read. If anyone knows the cure for 
>this, I'd certainly appreciated hearing from them on or off-list.

The default font configuration in every Linux distro I've met &^$^@*$@
stinks.  RH provides a package called ttfonts (often not installed by
default, why?).  But even if you install True Type fonts (ahhhh,
pretty....) you need to make sure they are in your font server path
***BEFORE*** any of those truly hideous X style fonts.  Will someone
please just make those fonts DIE DIE DIE!!!!!