Alice is slowly getting better. She doesn't scream as much as she used too, and only wakes up once in the middle of the night. That's a huge improvement, and we're just beginning to recover though my brain is still terribly dizzy at the moment :-)
FreeType
FreeType 2.1.10 is out, this fixes a bunch of bugs, but the memory savings I have mentioned in a previous diary entry are disabled by default. This is because this breaks several libraries on Unix that unfortunately use internal FT2 structures which changed during the optimizations.
The next version will be called 2.2.0, use a major library version number of 7 (instead of 6), and will _not_ install the internal/private headers (this was our original mistake which created this situation). Instead, they'll be replaced by files generating #errors at compile time with a message explaining the situation.
What it means is that an undecided amount of code is going to break when compiled against this version of the library, which is why I've begun writing patches for Pango, FontConfig and a few other libraries. I'm currently working on SDL_ttf and Qt.
It turns out to be a lot simpler than what I expected; my problem is that I don't know the exact list of libraries and applications that directly depend on FreeType internal structures and functions. If you happen to work at at Linux distribution company, or simply have a lot of disk space, huge bandwidth and plenty of free time (which really isn't my case at the moment), I'd be glad if you could grep for some of the lines below and report which packages contain them:
grep "FT_INTERNAL_" sources
grep "freetype/internal/" sources
Of course, 2.2.0 isn't out until we get a sufficient number of patches and make them available on our web site. I don't expect to see that much problem however once the popular libs are out.
And yes, I've used Koders Search (www.koders.com) and it seems absolutely useless for this purpose.
Laptop
I've installed Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop, dual booting with XP, and I'm very impressed with it. However, trying to use it on an on-going basis is _very_ frustrating, because it lacks many of the niceties I'm used to on Windows. I'm not talking about Windows-specific items, rather about all the free cool-addons, most of them free software, that I regularly use.
Does anyone know an equivalent for the following on Gnome, or even, sigh..., on KDE:
- TortoiseCVS
- TortoiseSVN
- Putty Pageant (I mean a Gnome or KDE applet)
And I can't get the damn thing to suspend properly, not even hibernate. I normally don't use the feature, because XP boots _very_ quickly on this machine, but startup is so slow on Linux that it's painful. For the record, I use this machine on the train twice a day, each trip being 30 minutes, it's not like a nearly 2 minutes boot isn't a problem for me.