Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult. It's utterly outrageous that we have a law which supposedly prevents individuals from expressing their opinion. 3. A system of intense religious veneration of a particularperson, idea, or object, especially one consideredspurious or irrational by traditional religious bodies;as, the Moonie cult.[PJC] even if you don't like that, there's: 2. A system of religious belief and worship.[1913 Webster] so that covers every religion as a cult. As for dangerous - they have a well documented history of legal threats, intimidating behaviour, etc. Update: It seems that sanity is not lost and the guy isn't going to be prosecuted because, as should have been fairly obvious, his sign wasn't inciting anything \o/

... neither of them good. First off, in a stunning piece of fail, Lenovo have used a drive from one of the few manufacturers that enforces region coding on DVDs in hardware - Matshita, aka Matsushita, aka Panasonic. This is very frustrating and made worse by the drive shipping in a state with no region code set, so no DVDs at all will play. I now either have the choice of changing it no more than 5 times, or risking the drive with some custom firmware which claims to remove the region code. Secondly, and more worryingly, there is a new BIOS release for the X300, but one report from a Linux user thus far suggests that the machine has started hard locking. I can't confirm because this machine is far too important to me (ie I use it for work), so I am holding back on the update until I know what's going on. Update It occurred to me that it might be useful to document how I changed the region code - install regionset and run it. It will show you your current region code (0xFF for me, ie region 0) and how many changes you have left, then ask if you want to change it. Second update Lenovo actually withdrew the BIOS update, so clearly something was wrong with it. This page lists the models for which they have pushed out a fixed version. The X300 is currently still listed as "Coming Soon" :(

Just a quick update on how things are going. I've been pretty slow lately because of trying to get as many bugs fixed in Hardy as possible. However, we've still been working away a bit and the team has continued to grow.

Reliance on gnome is being reduced, and portability is being increased - you can now run Terminator on FreeBSD without a full GNOME install. Configuration has been entirely replaced - we now offer a stack of config options. If you have gconf available we will look there for gnome terminal settings. If that doesn't work out we'll look for a config file in your home directory and if that fails we have comprehensive default settings. I'm hoping to push out a release soon because we've also accumulated a few small bugfixes. The plan from here is to have a major release to land the tabs feature, and then go all out for a massive 1.0 when we can save/restore meta-profiles. Woo!

You have new hardware (most likely server). You pop in a debian/ubuntu installer CD, tell it what kind of keyboard you have and expect it to scan the CDROM for packages, but....uh-oh, it can't find the CD! What do you do?! Well, realistically there's not a lot you can do to make it work, but you can do a lot to help get it fixed. You need to pull off /var/log/syslog, the output of lspci, lspci -v and lspci -vvnn. You may very well find yourself having a problem with that though, because you're still pretty early in a typical linux boot process, so you probably don't have any disks mounted and you may find yourself missing any modules to make that happen. You should have usb-storage.ko though. That and isofs.ko. Can you see where this is going? :) find the .udeb's on your install CD with a working computer, ar -x the core fs modules one and pull out ext3 (and jbd and mbcache), or vfat and its dependencies. put them in a directory, then do mkisofs -o /dev/usbstick1 /path/to/modules. You now have a partition on your USB stick that is an ISO9660 filesystem (ie a CD). Obviously make sure you don't do this on a USB stick you care about the contents of. Chuck the USB stick into the broken server, modprobe usb-storage, mount the newly appeared partition and copy the modules over to the right place in /lib/modules/. Unmount the USB stick, modprobe the drivers and now you can put in an ext3/vfat formatted USB stick and you have somewhere to write the debugging information to! Easy! :) Now file a bug with the debugging information you collected.

The Thinkpad X300 is a pretty tasty beast. Much nicer screen than the X40, and the SSD is a huge win for lots of IO workloads. I've still got a fair few Linux support oddities to work through, but thus far people are being very helpful. When the support is there, this will be a laptop to be highly recommended.

luisbg has a blog posting of the very interesting looking flickbook, specifically a video which shows Terminator being used to launch the demo. Woo!

A few sneaky bugs slipped into 0.8, so we've got 0.8.1 out now to take care of them. Enjoy!

0.8 had a few annoying little bugs we decided to squash quickly, so without further ado, 0.8.1 is now out and on the homepage.

This is a bugfix and feature and infrastructure release. It should be a lot better than 0.7 in less focussed ways - e.g. icons, menu integration, better gconf support. As usual hit up the Terminator home page for more.

Bugs fixed, icons drawn, docs written, features added. It's bonanza time for Terminator