Firefox 3 gets printing dialog face lift, now uses gtkprint

One of the great things about Firefox 3 is that it has received a lot of love and attention in the Linux department. So many things have been accomplished including native gtk+ themes in html content, better gnome-vfs support, use of stock gtk+ icons in many areas and countless other improvements.

The latest improvement comes in yet another feature that makes Firefox better integrate into the typical gtk+/gnome environment. The latest nightly builds of Firefox 3 use the native gtkprint dialog instead of the old xul one. This is mainly thanks to the work of Michael Ventnor in bug 193001.

A screenshot is available here.

How to try the new metacity composite manager without installing it.

The next major release of metacity, the gnome window manager, will have a built in composite manager that will build enabled by default if libxcomposite is installed.

To try this without installing it, install subverion and run the following in a terminal:

mkdir metacity-trunk

cd metacity-trunk

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/metacity/trunk metacity

cd metacity

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr

then run ‘./src/metacity — replace’ to run it directly from the source tree.To activate the composite manager, run the following command in a terminal window.

gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager –type bool true

It performs quite fast although not as fast as xfwm4 but lacks the extra eye candy offered by compiz. Still most users should find it sufficient. Another good thing is that it doesn’t need libcm installed.

It should look something like the picture below. Note that transparency works in gnome-terminal.

If you decide to install it permanently, simple run:

su -c 'install -m755 ./src/metacity /usr/bin'

This will replace the installed metacity binary executable  with the new one. It works perfectly on my Nvidia card despite my old AMD 2300+ Sempron processor.

Microsoft Making Millions Off Novell Linux

Initially done solely to show us that even Novell, a big Linux vendor, admits that Linux breaks Microsoft intellectual property, Microsoft has now found that their agreement with Novell has proved to be very profitable.

According to informationweek.com, “Microsoft has now sold more than 40,000 SUSE Linux certificates to businesses and governments around the world. The company does not, in its own financial statements, report how much revenue that represents. But given that Novell credits the interoperability alliance for generating $356 million in cash inflows, then Microsoft, too, must be raking in millions from selling SUSE Linux service and support.”

While it is evident that Microsoft’s agreement with Novell is different that the one made with other distributions such as Linspire and TurboLinux that did it out of fear of the whole IP propaganda, any financial profits Microsoft does make is still negligible when compared to how much they make from selling Windows and Office to big comapanies and users.