john.layt.net

The printing changes are going well, I have the Advanced Mode Current Page and Odd/Even in X11 working solidly, and the Simple Mode Odd/Even CUPS fallback hack is working fine except for one small glitch.  If you select to print a range from say page 4 to page 6 and then select Even pages, you do not get pages 4 and 6 as you might expect, but only page 5 instead.  Why?  Because CUPS thinks your page 4 is actually page 1 as it's the first page it has seen :-)  I need to hack in a cheat to either tell the app to produce an extra page at the start, or lie to CUPS and tell it to printOdd pages instead.  Other than that, I now have to move onto OSX and Windows support.

I'm currently building a Windows Qt/KDE dev environment in a Virtualbox (Windows 7 RC1 so it didn't cost a cent) so I can check my changes work over there and start on the dialog extensions.  The emerge tool the WinKDE guys have built is absolutely brilliant and a god-send, albeit a little short on documentation about what to do once the environment is set up :-)  I've also being dredging my way through the MSDN documentation on the Print Dialog and after years of hearing about how good the MS doco was and how we'll never win over developers until we meet that standard all I have to say is "Bullhockey".  Don't believe a word of the hype folks, it's terrible, at least for the printing stuff: TechBase, Qt, and the OSX doco especially are all way way better.  I'm now looking through some Windows FOSS code instead to see how others do it in the real world.  It looks like to get the Current Page and Odd/Even features in the dialog may be a Win2k and above feature using PRINTDLGEX instead of the Win95 and above PRINTDLG which Qt currently uses, which means quite some work to do.  But I could be wrong.

Does anyone have suggestions for the best distro for use on a Macbook5,1 late 2008?  I'm currently running openSUSE 11.1 which is getting a little long in the tooth and has issues with the 3D graphics and touchpad support and I'm finally tired of them not working right. I know the latest (K)ubuntu has far better Macbook hardware support and an active Mac community, but I'm reluctant after previous problems with the development environment and breakages over there.  Any suggestions for other distros with good Macbook support?

And I've finally received confirmation from the Travel Agency so:

Don't forget peeps, update your travel details on the wiki and sign up for the tourist trip before June 28th and for any sporting activities, it would be nice to have some company on my "Footing" along the beach :-).