I was surprised to find that Ubuntu has a package for Chromium - the open source browser from Google. It uses the WebKit HTML engine, and a new javascript engine called V8.
I love trying out new stuff, so I managed to hack it into my debian laptop, but (I guess due to ia32 / gtk differences) the browser won’t display any pages, everything just shows up blank.
I then started to try and install on a 32-bit ubuntu machine, but of course I also decided to upgrade it to Jaunty Jackalope. Jaunty is still in alpha, so I wasn’t surprised to find its wasn’t a totally smooth upgrade. I’m still working on it… well the upgrade is done and everything looks good. Unfortunately, I’m still getting blank screens with Chromium. 
Turns out I just needed to install the Microsoft fonts installer package. After that, it started to display pages. Let’s see if that works for on my Debian 64-bit machine:
apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Nope, I guess I already had that installed.
I noticed on the opening screen that blogging is discouraged. That’s too bad, I disagree with the statement that it doesn’t help.
Trying this out, seems like it might work:
http://icehot.wordpress.com/2008/11/27/firefox-31b2-ubuntu-repository/
Yes, it works. And it definitely feels zippier.
I dusted off my Everex laptop to try building SquirrelFish in WebKit since its a 32-bit operating system (the VIA C7 is not 64-bit, but the Via nano is).
Meanwhile, I happened upon the “Dust” theme from Ubuntu, installed it, and am completely amazed. Its gorgeous. Thank you!
Dust Theme from Ubuntu
It feels a bit zippier too. Now if I can only figure out how to get the xfwm4 clone to install on Xubuntu…. turns out I didn’t need to use the xfwm4 theme, I just used the gtk2 theme and it worked.
My SquirrelFish efforts.
I’ll admit, it took me awhile to use linux as my “desktop” computer, but I’ve been proudly been using linux for well over 5 years. That’s not even that long of a time - I wish I started much sooner!
And because hind sight is 20/20, I’ll ask the Docunext readers - why aren’t you using linux? If you need a little help, just try a live CD from Ubuntu! It will let you try it out without needing to install anything. And if you have an extra computer or laptop lying around that you aren’t using, why not install it on that?
You can find an Ubuntu Live CD here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download