My two-year-old HP laptop is getting slower and slower. Time for an XP re-install, but that’s a big ordeal. I opted to give Linux another try (maybe the third time will be the charm).

I installed and configured Eclipse, but it was running super-slow. A quick Google search revealed a simple trick:

The eclipse launcher resides at

/bin/eclipse

yet the actual executable for eclipse is at

/usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse

If you just bypass the wrapper script in /bin/eclipse and execute the binary, you will have increased speed for eclipse.

That seemed to take care of that.

I’m a dedicated Opera-holic. I simply can’t/won’t do without Opera’s super-useful e-mail client. Of course it runs fine on Linux, but often the fonts look terrible on many websites, even with the Microsoft core TrueType fonts installed.

Soo, after another quick Google search here’s what I found:

If you are sure that you have enough truetype fonts available (through

xft. ‘opera -debugfont’ will list the ones opera finds on startup), you can try disabling X font support by adding this line to the [User Prefs] section of one of the opera configuration files (e.g. /etc/opera6rc):

Enable Core X Fonts=0

Voila, nice fonts in Opera!