January 23, 2012
> Dunno, Driver manager (or something like that) showed me an empty list saying I don't have proprietary drivers installed. Don't know how to find prepackaged drivers. Missed it in both Mint and Ubuntu.
>
> Well, the complicated thing is that my notebook is new and it has latest hardware: support for GeForce GT 520MX was added to driver 285, but nvidia-current is 280. I don't know what this "support" means; if vdpau will work with prepackaged driver, that's great.

VDPAU doesn't work with the OSS drivers at the moment - you
need the binary driver for that.
It does sound like Ubuntu simply doesn't have the newest driver packaged yet - you can either wait for 12.04 - or -

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get install nvidia-graphics-drivers

should install unofficially packaged driver 290 found here:

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates?field.series_filter=natty

(WARNING: didn't test it)


> Wikipedia mentions that Ubuntu has an issue with high power consumption. I'm not sure whether it's my problem, but they try to address it in Ubuntu 12 using very nifty tricks like putting USB controllers to low power mode and hunting down software with frequent wakeups and filing bugs against them. They don't consider GUI system as a culprit at all.

The main power issue is the ASPM bug in the Linux kernel, fix for which should be backported to kernel in Ubuntu 12.04 (AFAIK).
I do have about 7 hours battery (coding) on my notebook,
which is more than people have on Win7
(university notebook - paid by the EU) - but that's KDE - with social desktop - and desktop effects - disabled.

> I don't have performance issues, I have high CPU load in idle mode. I'm currently on win7 and the cooler seems to be off, in Ubuntu and Mint the cooler worked at high speed and quite warm air was coming from the radiator.

Weird. Doesn't happen to me on any distro.

That said, did you look at the system monitor?
Notice which process is using up the CPU - if it's something in Unity,
then KDE/XFCE/LXDE/whatever can fix your problem. Unity IS a resource hog, but it shouldn't cause a permanent load on the
CPU.

There is a possible cause, but that would be GPU, not CPU load:
NVidia stated that they don't intend to support Optimus on Linux.
What's worse, if you have an Optimus GPU, it runs on 100% all the time even though you're not using it.

That said, there are third party programs that provide Optimus support, Bumblebee and Ironhide. Both are alpha at the moment, though.
Work on my notebook (which has Optimus) - but I don't use graphics
too much, so I just used Ironhide to disable the NVidia GPU and
only enable it when playing games, running emulators or modelling (Blender).
That saves a LOT of battery life. 3 hr when GeForce is running constantly
vs 7hr when it's not.


> The wubi option is quite amasing, I hesitate to go for full-fledged dual-boot installation.

Wubi slows the system down quite drastically.
(or at least did a few years ago, didn't test it recently)


January 23, 2012
On 23/01/2012 00:23, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
<snip>
> Except that druntime and Phobos use those APIs. So, it matters. And since the
> number of people using pre-Win2K is extremely low, I see that as a complete
> non-issue.

In the cases where this is unavoidable, it can be dealt with by documenting which bits of druntime and Phobos require WinXP+ so that programmers wishing to support Win2k or below can avoid using them.

<snip>
> The next version of Windows beyond that that it would be useful to be able to
> say that we don't support anything older than is Vista. I would _love_ to be
> able to do that Vista is the oldest that we support, because Vista added a
> bunch of useful API calls and the like. But we obviously can't do that anytime
> soon. The user base for XP is huge. The same can't be said of pre-Win2K.
<snip>

Indeed, I'm inclined to think WinXP is still the most used OS now.

Stewart.
January 23, 2012
Microsoft ended mainstream (i.e. free) support for XP nearly 3 years ago.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173

I would not make supporting an OS no longer supported by its vendor a priority, particularly in light of the considerable efforts still needed elsewhere.
January 23, 2012
"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote in message news:jfk1r6$2a5j$1@digitalmars.com...
> On 1/23/12 3:14 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Walter Bright"<newshound2@digitalmars.com>  wrote in message news:jfj0ao$3q9$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>
>>> Another way of looking at it is Phobos should provide snap-together building blocks, not trivial combinations of them.
>>
>> So whenever there's trivia to be done, it should be cluttering up the *user's* code instead?
>
> In this case I think it's reasonable to have the user write read(to!string(filename)). It's simple composition.
>

The problem is it's unnecessary composition. But I guess I'm not getting anywhere here.


January 23, 2012
"Todd VanderVeen" <tdv@part.net> wrote in message news:jfkmod$gst$1@digitalmars.com...
>
> I would not make supporting an OS no longer supported by its vendor a priority,

I still don't see how that's even relevent.


January 23, 2012
On Monday, January 23, 2012 18:13:11 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Todd VanderVeen" <tdv@part.net> wrote in message news:jfkmod$gst$1@digitalmars.com...
> 
> > I would not make supporting an OS no longer supported by its vendor a priority,
> 
> I still don't see how that's even relevent.

Presumably, if the OS is no longer supported, then it's no longer used by enough people for it to be worth our time and effort to support. But that presupposes that the number of users is related to the level of support by the OS vendor, which in the case of XP, probably isn't really true. It may be by the time that Microsoft's support for XP is completely gone though.

Ultimately, the question is user base. How many D programmers program for pre- XP Windows? I would expect the number to be very few. And given that D didn't really exist at that point, it's not like there are legacy programs that would need to be supported either. It would pretty much purely be D programmers writing new code for old systems which might be affected by the lack of Win9x support.

At this point though, the key thing is being able to stop worrying about whether the W functions are supported. If we can assume at least Win2K, then the W functions are supported, and beyond that, the version of Windows doesn't really matter. None of the API calls that we're using at this point even need XP instead of Win2K. Beyond that, the question would be whether we could assume Vista and use its new API calls (XP didn't really add many calls), and the answer to that right now is obviously no.

- Jonathan M Davis
January 24, 2012
"Kiith-Sa" <42@theanswer.com> wrote in message news:stutnobwbglkcuyeqzzr@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
>
> Disable akonadi: alt+f2, start typing akonadi, akonadi configuration menu will appear, click it, go to akonadi server configuration tab, press stop at the bottom right. Also uncheck Use internal MYsQL server. Notification will show that akonadi has been stopped.
>
> Disable Semantic Desktop:
> 1)System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Basic Settings, untick Nepomuk and
> Strigi
>
> 2)System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Desktop Query, untick "Index files
> on removable media" and untick every folder under "Customise index
> folders."
> 3)System Settings -> Desktop Search -> Backup, set "Backup frequency" to
> Disable
>
> Disable Notifications:
> a: System Settings -> Application and System Notifications -> Manage
> Notifications, untick all the "Show me a message in a popup" under
> "Desktop Search" and Semantic Desktop"
>

Ahh, thanks. Strigi was already off, and I couldn't find "Desktop Search -> Desktop Query" or "Desktop Search -> Backup", but everything else was on and I turned them off. We'll see how it goes.

>
> Note that KDE on Ubuntu has historically been fucked up.
> I've had much better experience on OpenSuse.
> (not sure why, but a lot of KDE people hate Kubuntu for
> giving KDE bad credit)
>

Interesting, I didn't know.

> I'm currently using Kubuntu 11.10 with KDE 4.7 though, and haven't encountered any bugs - except social desktop, which I disabled (Kubuntu/KDE4.6 wasn't usable - OpenSuse was)
>
> That said, KDE 4.8 is going to be released in 2 days, and it's mostly bugfixes and optimizations. So if you try KDE4 again, I recommend waiting for the next round of distros with 4.8 .
>
> KDE plans for 4.9 is also bugfixes, while 5.0 (don't panic) should be a
> refactor
> without breaking user interface - but they plan to clean up the APIs (as
> opposed to 4.0 - where they rewrote everything from scratch).
>

Yea, bugs aside, I actually don't really like the UI much anyway. For example, the notification system is not really great and is overused anyway (Example: Extract an archive in dolphin, the new directory for it appears, "Oh, ok, great, that was fast", go about your own business, a minute later see a message saying that only *NOW* has it actually finished extracting.)

>
> I'm not sure if Trinity has enough devs to do anything but maintain KDE3
> comptatibility - MATE seems more promising to me (I liked Gnome 2 even
> though
> I'm converted to KDE now).

Haven't heard of MATE, I'll look into it.


January 24, 2012
On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 20:38:21 UTC, Kiith-Sa wrote:
> VDPAU doesn't work with the OSS drivers at the moment - you
> need the binary driver for that.

I was wrong. Seems like the driver installation was so transparent, I barely noticed anything, at least, bumblebee did it for me. Though there seems to be no way have vdpau on my hybrid graphics today.

>> I don't have performance issues, I have high CPU load in idle mode. I'm currently on win7 and the cooler seems to be off, in Ubuntu and Mint the cooler worked at high speed and quite warm air was coming from the radiator.
>
> Weird. Doesn't happen to me on any distro.
>
> That said, did you look at the system monitor?

System monitor reports some weird information for me: it claims all processes are sleeping and consume 0% CPU yet on the processors tab it shows constant load of about 10% jumping from core to core. Anyway, I switched back to Mint and plan to address my issues on their forum.

> Notice which process is using up the CPU - if it's something in Unity,
> then KDE/XFCE/LXDE/whatever can fix your problem. Unity IS a resource hog, but it shouldn't cause a permanent load on the
> CPU.
>
> There is a possible cause, but that would be GPU, not CPU load:
> NVidia stated that they don't intend to support Optimus on Linux.
> What's worse, if you have an Optimus GPU, it runs on 100% all the time even though you're not using it.

It shouldn't produce heat because there's no load on it. Bumblebee 3 claims to turn off discrete GPU by default an turn it on only on demand when an application is run with optirun.
January 24, 2012
24.01.2012 2:32, Nick Sabalausky пишет:
> "Andrei Alexandrescu"<SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org>  wrote in message
> news:jfk1r6$2a5j$1@digitalmars.com...
>> On 1/23/12 3:14 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Walter Bright"<newshound2@digitalmars.com>   wrote in message
>>> news:jfj0ao$3q9$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>>
>>>> Another way of looking at it is Phobos should provide snap-together
>>>> building blocks, not trivial combinations of them.
>>>
>>> So whenever there's trivia to be done, it should be cluttering up the
>>> *user's* code instead?
>>
>> In this case I think it's reasonable to have the user write
>> read(to!string(filename)). It's simple composition.
>>
>
> The problem is it's unnecessary composition. But I guess I'm not getting
> anywhere here.
>
>

We have a proverb in Russia: "I told him about Thomas (Фому), and he told me about Erema (Ерёму)!"

So, Walter say that calling `read(to!string(filename))` is easy and trivial. Yes it is.

Nick say that it's unnecessary composition. Yes it is, it can be done in library.

So, what is the problem? Nick point is that this composition is a common case, like reading file content as a string (readText function) and shouldn't be done by hands every time. Maybe. But one developer (or a couple) opinion isn't enough to answer this question. A think a voting is necessary to solve the problem.
January 24, 2012
22.01.2012 23:55, Denis Shelomovskij пишет:
> In this thread I would like a reason of trying to support Win95/98/Me to
> be discussed.

"Get rid of win9x support" pull requests:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/140
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/406
Diff without indention:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/406/files?w=1

Phobos will reduce in weight about 500 lines.