Tanguy Ortolo

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image

Floating and tiling window managers

In the X Window System, the window manager is that piece of software that places your windows and allows you to move them, resize them, hide them, etc. If your windows have titles on top of them, with buttons to close them or reduce them, it is thanks to the window manager. There are two major types of window managers:

Floating window managers

They are the most usual window managers, that allow you to place an size your windows freely on the screen, in a way where they are independent of each other, possibly overlapping, just as you would be able to place sheets of paper on your desk.

Tiling window managers

They are a more elitist type of window manager, that adjust the size and position of the windows so there is no overlapping and no space lost between windows, thus tiling the screen.

Floating window management

Tiling window management

The frontier between these two types is not very tight, because some floating window managers have limited tiling features, and almost all the tiling window manager have floating modes for programs that are not adapted to tiling.

For what it is worth, here is a report on my experience with three tiling window managers. Perhaps it may help people that are still hesitating to switch to tiling window management?

Read more Tiling window managers

Mobile devices

A number of people are using small mobile devices to read Web pages. These devices have small screens, which make it hard to read pages designed for a large screen width.

Read more Mobile browsers, you suck (or: RTFM CSS media type)

I am organizing two signing parties in France:

• Saturday, November 17th at 12:15 at the JDLL in Lyon;
• Sunday, November 25th at 11:45 at the Mini-DebConf in Paris.

Read more Upcoming signing parties in France

The title of the next James Bond movie! Or will that be the next OpenBSD release song? ;-)