I’m one of these hopeless nostalgic people who like to watch old computer hardware, and think, “Now, that’s the way they used to do it”. And then I install Fedora on them, and continue to use them. One of my true gems is my G3 iBook, now running f17/ppc. It used to run fairly stable with XFCE, but because of BZ813949, XFCE has become unusable. By chance, I found that applications using Qt were not hit by this bug, for example the Arora web browser worked without problems, while the rest of the fonts on the screen were rendered to pieces. So I thought, what a pity there is no light-weight desktop environment based on Qt. Then my next thought was, Wait, I don’t know that for sure.
So I looked around, and found Razor-qt. From the homepage: “Razor-qt is an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines.”
So, Razor-qt could be just what the doctor ordered. There were no packages for Fedora 17, though some srpms for f16 were available. So I added some trivial patches, and built packages for fedora 17 on ppc, i686 and x86_64. There is also a temporary yum repo there.
The result was over expectations. And Qupzilla starts faster than Firefox 13. Hurray! I can surf on my iBook again.
Tags: Desktop Environment, Fedora, ppc, Razor-qt
Interested in submitting these for review and inclusion in fedora formally?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join
I’d be happy to help with the process, and pkg reviews, and what-not.
Rex,
Since the number of packages in the project is fairly limited, I may even maintain them myself. But I’ll check with upstream first. Don’t wanna step on anybody’s toes.
Ingvar