I recently bought a netbook (Dell 2100 N), which I would advise anyone considering a netbook to consider. First of all, an option is to have it come with Ubuntu pre-installed. The main value to me is that I immediately know that at least _some_ version of Linux will manage the hardware issues. Without getting into any distro-bashing, I'll just go on to say that as soon as I could, I replaced Ubuntu with Fedora 11, mainly because I'm more comfortable with it, and have lots of experience compiling Scribus on Fedora. [One of the lame things about this factory-installed Ubuntu is that you lose >5GB of your 16GB SSD to a vfat "rescue partition", which, if you booted into by mistake or on purpose, would completely blow away any data you might have saved in Ubuntu and restore you to a pristine factory-installed state. (ie, Dell-Linux for Dummies)]
Ok, getting back to this list, once I had Fedora, then I knew all about SVN and cmake and compiling Scribus. Everything went well until I opened File > Preferences, and noted that the Preferences dialog ends up being taller than the 576 pixels this netbook can manage. The problem this causes is that you might be able to make various changes in your Preferences, but how do you save them? Eventually I figured out that I could make changes, then press Alt+O as an equivalent for the Ok button. I would add at this point that, in contrast to some other apps with this problem, you cannot Tab to the offscreen Ok button -- it seems to get stuck at the first offscreen button, regardless of whether you're doing Tab or Shift+Tab. The Solution: Eventually, with some playing around that many of us Linux users are prone to, I can report that, at least with Fedora 11 and KDE, if you click on the little icon in the upperleft part of the title bar, you can then select Advanced > Special Window Settings, where you can check the Size checkbox, THEN click the drop down list that says Do Not Affect, where you can click on an item Force. NOW you can change the settings, which for my computer specified a height of 683 pixels, to something that is somewhere onscreen. Note that once you do this, after you click Apply, Click Ok in the Advanced Settings dialog, you must Quit and restart Scribus to check out your changes. This is not the total solution. What you will find in the dialog is that some tabs contain more lines of text than will fit in the newly shrunken dialog. In addition, no slider appears to allow access to the missing information. So in the General tab, you must reduce the size of the font, more specifically Font Size (Menus) so that everything fits in the dialog (I can manage 6-7 points). Click Apply and you see your result onscreen. I would add that changing the font size does not affect the dialog size, in case you wondered. Having gone through all this, my suspicion is that an alternative approach is somewhere in the bowels of Qt -- at least it seems sensible that Qt should be paying attention to my display settings. If I figure this out I will post an update. Greg
