In a comment on a recent entry , Ryan asked me howstable my 64-bit Linux installs have been. The answer is kind ofcomplicated, but the quick summary is that I am happy with themachines and they're stable.

Currently and in the recent past, I have dealt with three AMD 64-bitmachines, two using ASUS M2N4-SLI motherboards, and one with a TyanTomcat K8E S2865ANRF, and all with 2GB of

Some TrueType fonts look significantly worse on some Linux distributionsthan on Microsoft Windows or MacOS. This is due to the usual reasonthat things suck on Linux: patents. TrueTypefonts can have special hints for looking good at low resolution, butusing those hints is apparently covered by some Apple patents in (some)countries with software patents.

(For the gory details, see here .)

Pretty much everyone on Linux uses the FreeType library to renderTrueType fonts. FreeType has implementations of the patented stuff,but Fedora Core

In the spirit of earlier heroic failures , I justsaw someone attempt to put an entire POST form in the actual HTTPrequest. No, really. The incoming request looked something like this:

login=%5Burl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextlevelnews.com%2F [.. elided..] %2F70.html%0D%0A+&view=login&page=blog%2Flinks%2FBestToolPOST/~cks/

The more I do stuff on my x86_64 Fedora Core 5 machine, the more Icome to understand that people must not have actually tried to use thisstuff. The latest adventure was trying to build an i386 RPM.

The best tool for this is mock , a tool forrebuilding RPMs in distribution environments, like (in theory) 'FedoraCore 5 for i386'. In practice, it needs some clubbing. The mainproblem is that when mock sets up