...written by Christian Thalinger twisti's weblog

When I switched back to OpenSolaris I wanted to use Compiz instead of Metacity to have at least some eye candy.  After switching to Compiz I noticed that the Meta key is not working in Emacs.  Since it worked in the "Normal Visual Effects" mode I was sure it's related to one of the Compiz plugins that was turned on by default in the "Custom" mode.

After some trial and error I found out that the "Group and Tab Windows" in the "Window Management" section is the bugger.  It uses a couple of <Mod4> key bindings and one of them is <Mod4>x.

Disabling that plugin makes M-x work again in Emacs.

A few months ago I got a new laptop (unibody MacBook Pro) and I decided to stay with Mac OS X because of two main reasons: Broadcom WiFi and the touchpad.  Everything looked very slick and worked, obviously, out-of-the-box.  A perfect OS for private use.

But developing on that OS is a pain in the...  Apple's GDB drives me nuts!  It was crashing every now and then and was 95% of the time not able to call simple C++ instance methods.  Completely useless!!!

I filed a few bugs in Apple's Radar and tried to get the FSF guys to support Darwin in their GDB.  Some help in both cases, but nothing I could really use.

So, yesterday I decided to bite the bullet, install OpenSolaris again, use NDIS Wrapper for the Broadcom WiFi and to give the xorg-input-synaptics package of SFE a try for the touchpad.  The first one is working flawlessly, but only in 32-bit mode.  That means I can't test 64-bit HotSpot locally.  Well, I can live with that for some time.  I didn't have time to try the second one yet but I hope it works.

Glad to be back.