Ubuntu, somebody's favorite Linux-based distribution

Well, to get into the hype, I've installed Ubuntu 10.10 on new Asus X34F. Here's floating post what tweaks I did to get it into shape.

First note about all those "Herons" and "Lucids". Who said word-based versions are better than number-based? Words are better than numbers when they have meaning, and that's not the case with version numbers. So, as my mind is not going to waste its cycle on remember that stuff for some more time yet, note to myself: 10.10 == Maverick.

• -Replace dark-strange-buttons-god-knows-where default theme with Clearlooks. And don't even let me start about wallpaper...
• Fix suspend issue due to usb host module (give link to forum)
• Make mc stop pretending it's running on 50-years old tty and do Esc key well.
• Get bitmap fonts to be available for selection: remove /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf symlink which rules them out, and instead link 70-force-bitmaps.conf (yes, there's 70-yes-bitmaps.conf, but who wants to check if they'll listen if asked politely, granted that they managed to disable classy fonts at all).
• Set nice bitmap font for Gnome Terminal, because you don't want to file your eyes with anti-aliased vector novelties on a color background. We need classical "Fixed" font from X11's package fonts-misc-misc. For reference, one of font files is /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/10x20.pcf.gz . When selecting this font for console, make sure to try different sizes: there's some weird substitution for some of them - instead of nice-looking sans-serif there's serif popping up. "Fixed 16" what worked here on X34F (same real size is "Fixed 20" on nx9420/Gentoo, probably because of different dpi or something).
• Uncommented net/ipv4/ip_forward=1  in /etc/ufw/sysctl.conf
• NO FIREWALL AFTER DEFAULT INSTALL?! https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UFW : "By default UFW is enabled but all ports are left open (otherwise there would be no Internet access following installation)." It's only on Ubuntu "not all ports open" means "no Internet access". They've got to learn that ports may be incoming and outgoing. Set incoming to Denied.
  
• Anyway, figured out masquerading. It's a shame it cannot be configured by simple rule and in GUI. It's outdated to think masquerading is only needed for router box, nowadays it's needed to give net access for sart devices, virtual machines, etc. The problem I had was that even after setting up masquerading per Ubuntu guide, I couldn't ping google. Well, the VM used physical Ubuntu box as DNS, so I had to add rule to enable incoming port 53.

TODO:

• Where's my hibernate?

WebKitGtk vs QtWebKit

Comparing functionality and features of Qt (QtWebKit) and GTK+ (WebKitGtk) ports of WebKit.

Scrolling Performance

It seems that as of 1.2.5, WebKitGtk has one fairly big usability issue comparing to QtWebKit: it has very slow (and high CPU usage) scrolling on some pages/sites. All browsers based on WebKitGit are slow on those pages, while all browsers based on QtWebKit are OK there, so that's indeed a framework issue.

Midori FAQ has an entry on this ("Scrolling on website xyz is very slow").

It turns out that this can be result of multiple bugs:

• [Cairo] Enhance the performance of shadowed elements by tiling the shadow area - biggest contributor apparently
• [Cairo] Font fallback determination is very ineffecient

WebKitGtk 1.3.7 status: Seems to be mostly fixed, all pages from below show good scrolling performance, though ones with image backgrounds show not as smooth scrolling (but that's yet another issue).

Examples:

• http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2008/03/python-httplib-performance-problems: glorious example - scrolls well in the post body, but as soon as reaches table of comments, it's a crawl if not a hang.
• http://careers.stackoverflow.com/Jobs/7000/stack-overflow-developer-stack-overflow: entire page scrolls bad (note: most StackOverflow pages are not affected).
• http://forums.urbanterror.info/topic/22445-intel-gma-hd-performance-gma5700mhd/ 
• http://techfreaks4u.com/blog/?p=1021: just degraded scrolling performance.
• Login to Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/#!/search/#linux

Related:

• http://blogs.igalia.com/alex/2010/09/17/rendering-shadows-and-tiles/
• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=860692 

Image Scaling Quality

On the other hand, when scaling images, QtWebKit 4.6.3 appears to (by default?) use nearest neighbour filter, while WebKitGtk uses smooth bilinear filter. In Qt 4.7.1 it's the same.

But it seems to be fixed in the latest QtWebKit, this post tells:

[01 Sep 2010] Re: no interpolation after scale image to a larger size?

This was fixed here:
[Qt] Enable smooth pixmap transforms by default

The change was too late for Qt 4.7 but will be part of the upcoming
QtWebKit 2.1 release.

As of now, QtWebKit 2.1 is still not released.

Btw, according to the patch, nearest-neigh filter is used exactly by default, it can be changed by client. Need to try that in Arora. - Well, not in Qt 4.6.3, there GraphicsContext::setImageInterpolationQuality() is empty.

Quest for Ultimate Browser

Web browsing in one or another form is probably the largest share of activity performed on computers today. And yet it's far from being perfect or even largely comfortable. Actually, it wasn't like that all the time. Back in old good days, you can browse web equally comfortable with both Netscape Navigator 2 and Lynx. But the more advanced web standards become, the more dynamic and media-rich web sites become, the more overall browsing performance and comfort deteriorate. Note that I don't talk here about how sites look or how well they represent information - there's big progress in that no doubt. The talk is about how well browsing of hundreds and thousands of such cool sites is managed. There're two biggest problems with modern browsing: performance and stability.
[...]

Midori (0.2.9):

• All windows block if there's a JS modal dialog
• Has a setting to not load/render pages from restored session on restart, just show placeholders. - I miss this much in Arora.
• Session recorded just for one (main) window. Tabs opened in other windows are lost over restart/crash. This is show-stopper bug, made me use Arora as a promary browser instead. 

Arora (0.11):

• Always puts a new tab as the last, no setting for that.
• Show KBs downloaded for the page.
• After some usage it turned out that session management is not robust: after the crash, I regularly get situation that windows and tabs are "restored" in the same numbers they were before, but each tab opens file://$HOME (yes, the local home dir). Or, Arora just forgets that it should restore session and shows its home page.

VI-like galore: dwb, jumanji, surf, uzbl (still review more), luakit

Floating Posts

I'm going to maintain some "research" topics (posts) which are updated over time. Date of such topics may be reset to the current from time to time. Such topics are tagged as "floating".