Time for media players. I now have Totem (a gtk2 frontend for xine) and mplayer installed. I like the dvdnav of Totem and the speed of mplayer. If I could have mplayer core, dvdnav and Totem UI, I’d be one pleased delusional. However, at the moment that is not to be right now.

Gentoo uses emerge as its package manager. This in turn uses ebuild files as its package format. mplayer was the first ebuild file I’ve had to hack. The font file was not downloading, so I removed that download instruction from the ebuild file and wget’d the file myself and put it in the emerge working directory. Re-ran emerge mplayer and all seems to be fine now =)

I’ve been installing Gentoo over the last day or so. Even though it takes a long time (I started from a stage two, which compiles basically everything), it seems to be worth it. Maybe it is just my imagination, but things do seem faster. I could also be because Mandrake started a lot of applications at startup and my current system isn’t. We shall see once I start adding the apps I use regularly.

Though still in the final stages of testing, Layout-o-matic looks like a useful, timesaving tool. In a similar vein to the earlier mentioned list navigation tool, List-o-matic. Excellent tools, indeed.

The new ShellOn interface in v3 is quite a departure from the version two interface. I think that it is easy to use once you have taken your first steps. However, judging by the emails that I’ve recieved in response to the beta and release candiate versions, the main problem people have is that they are presented with a blank application to start with and are not sure where to begin. 37signals have written up a post about this so-called blank slate problem.

Online? Moi? With my reputation? You’d better believe it! Woohoo =)

Prepare for some appage apperances soon.