8 posts tagged “beryl”

So... The bleeding edge repos for Compiz-Fusion had committed proverbial suicide on me. I lost a lot of my great functionality that I had come to love from Compiz-Fusion. It crushed me, believe it or not. But I knew what I was getting in to by playing with something that's as deadly as a live razor blade... "If you play with the bleeding edge, prepare get cut!". Boy did I ever get cut... If anything, it smarts. After trying to flirt with the power of Terminal to use it as my sword to duel with the files that bring my user interface (GUI for the geek initiated) to life, otherwise I'd be returning to a VERY cold Terminal screen.

After trying to revive Compiz-Fusion with some prebuilt scripts to take the brain work out of slashing and mucking around in the Aptitude system, I decided to hack to the bone and get Beryl back up while reverting any severe changes from the install scripts for Compiz-Fusion from removing my ubuntu-desktop metapackage. After using a couple of commands to clean out bad Metacity themes and any other things being guilty of borking my configuration... I got the ubuntu-desktop package bolted up then I added the beryl, beryl-manager, heliodor, and emerald packages added to the mix. After all those installed and got all settled... I loaded the final bullet in the clip and pulled the trigger, sending the bullet into the body.

I rebooted the laptop and prepared to witness either one of two things... The death of my GUI or nothing at all. After the machine loaded up, it had my custom log-in screen... and I can't tell you the elation that ran through my mind. I realize that there's a limit to how far I can push the bleeding edge, especially when my laptop is my "production" machine. So some pearls of wisdom for new Linux users who want to play with the "knives" of open source and brand spanking new technology... Keep these in mind:

• Make sure you back-up everything.
• Make sure you fully know what each command does
• Read, read, read all documentation before mucking about
• Google (or any other search engine) is your friend
• Do not use a "daily" or "production" machine if you have any doubts.
• Respect the Terminal/Konsole/xTerm like a weapon, it can save your machine or hurt it.
  

So last night, I poked on to LifeHacker to check out if they had any slick posts about new productivity tips in either life or software, I found this slick little gem of an article there: "Power up your Linux Desktop with Compiz-Fusion" on LifeHacker. After about 20 minutes, I had Beryl replaced in favor of Compiz Fusion. I like it and it really does merge the best of both worlds.

Compiz was a "laboratory stable" project, but never was one to push the boundaries of neat productivity effects. Beryl, a fork of Compiz, did the opposite... It pushed to the bleeding edge. It was not for the weak at heart. After installing Compiz-Fusion, I can see the facets of both projects and it is spectacular...

Avant Window Navigator (from the bleeding edge Compiz-Fusion Repos) with the bouncing icons and window preview

The Cube with a custom background and reflections enabled

The Ring, an alternative to the Flip3D of Vista or your boring Alt-Tab of yesteryear

Expo, see all your desktops and drag apps to the workspace desired, reflections are enabled

I'll admit, I am a sucker for clean looking desktops. I don't like clutter and prefer a clean look. To the Linux crowd, Avant Window Navigator is an open-source replica of the OS X window-list and launcher. It is the most well known one with regard to the Gnome desktop environment users, but it still is under development. I originally held off on it as the functionality was lacking... until now. ExxonValdeez from #ubuntu-dallas had told me that the functionality has been increased so things have become a little more functional with it. After fighting the install for a good while until this morning... I have it tweaked to my liking. Enclosed in this post are images... I have retired the XP Inverse wallpaper for the press-release images of the Aston Martin DBS, a replica of the latest James Bond car in the most recent movie, "Casino Royale", for those who are curious.

Disclaimer: If you are seeing the "black bars" around Avant Window Navigator, that's a sign you need Beryl or Compiz-Fusion.

Some of the readers out there remember a few weeks back when I went on a brave streak to install Linux Mint and then Xubuntu with some frustrations met with both operating systems. After much thought and changes in approach, I have decided to change Suzaku to a unique change of theme for my return to Ubuntu.

I found a great widescreen wallpaper that was linked to InterFacelift and it was (appropriately) titled XP Inverse which is illustrated as an inversion of the default XP Bliss wallpaper by Microsoft for a default installation of Windows XP. The windows theme is a Metacity theme called "LinStA is not VISTA" in a black plastic/aluminum motif downloaded from Gnome-Look. The icon pack was from Gnome-Look called nuovoXT which goes well with the Linsta Metacity package. The icon behavior is set to the Glossy behavior. Beryl is running at boot-up with compositing running and a window effect of "burn" enabled. It is a nice corporate looking set-up with the burning windows going well with the background. Enclosed is an image of the new desktop:

I decided as I don't keep much on my machine and have web-resources to back up my stuff... (like del.icio.us for my bookmarks) I figured that I would try out Linux Mint just to have some fun and try it for a bit just to see how I like it. For having it installed for almost 5 days, it's quite an experience. The art is pleasant and all, but my reason for trying it was based on the mindset of the following:

If it's based on Ubuntu, then it should be just as great, right? I mean the basis of the software and core are essentially Ubuntu, it should provide a more fulfilling out-of-the-box experience.

With that mindset, I backed up my few downloads and files to my external hard drive, prepped the drive for Linux Mint, and just let it do its work. After about 30 minutes, the system was installed and I would begin use. True, Linux Mint has earned it's praise with me, but that is not to say that it has some things that I want to gripe about. Especially the fact that these things were not noticeable when the operating system ran as a LiveCD.

For some reason, the Window's style lay-out of the MintMenu irritated me and I had to configure it in the standard Gnome dual bar set-up. This was a personal preference, so it holds no bearing... I just would have expected that Mint would keep to a traditional Gnome configuration or that they use a set-up similar to DreamLinux. The Novell Gnome SLAB doesn't appear over all of the applications which is more of a bother to me... I would expect it to be on top, but sometimes, you have to click twice to make it appear over everything. That and when you click on something on the SLAB, the menu doesn't disappear... You have to click the MintMenu to close the SLAB.

Apparently the integration of the Mint icons wasn't very well thought out... as the other Gnome icon themes and any others that are used from Gnome-Look cause the sleek Linux Mint leaf logo to change to the Ubuntu circle logo. In a sense, the customization is a little limited from this set-back.

The oddest thing (to me, at least) was that the Metacity window theme was called "Cassandra Green", yet the windows were themed in blue. The irony was when you change to "Cassandra Blue", there's no difference in the window theming. I can only assume that someone who was in charge of the artwork portion had forgotten to change over the colors. I would have loved to see the windows match the great wallpaper with the operating system by default.

A pet peeve of mine and even a few other users is the old references from Ubuntu not thoughtfully changed over to the defaults of Linux Mint. The e-mail editor installed on Linux Mint is Mozilla Thunderbird, yet there was still a default reference to Evolution. Lucky for many, you can change that, by going into Preferences > Preferred Applications and change that. The second instance of this annoyed me because I could not get it to work... The default music player refers to Rhythmbox, but the installed media player is Amarok! I have the great and convenient multimedia keys on Suzaku that are a nice thing to have when you want to just flip through music and tunes. On Ubuntu, I had my "MediaDirect" button launch Rhythmbox and it was perfect! On Mint, the reference defaulted to Rhythmbox and with multiple attempts to try to correct it in gconf and MintConfig, the system would not change its binding to Amarok.

The final thing that disappointed me in Linux Mint was the fact of the "Install Software" command in the MintMenu does not bring up a nice choose and click software repository interface... It brings up Synaptic instead! Synaptic is by no means fun or easy to novice Linux users. Sure, they do have a software repository where applications are packed in .MINT files, but the list is by no means even comparable to the folks over at the Ubuntu GetDeb.net site! I am fortunate to have learned that Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu .DEB files or even installing from source... This came to me as a shock as I figured that a new user would definitely have no problems getting acquainted with Linux if they use Linux Mint... If the folks of Mint could give the users the ability to have a click and install/remove software menu, then it will have a great polish to the operating system that's very user friendly to those just diving into Linux.

I won't let Mint go away with bad praise... I do like the multimedia integration as it really is top notch. It takes the brainwork out of using the Terminal to enable extra repositories, apt-get all the media packages, then install. That being great for getting a PC ready to enjoy instantly, rather than 10 - 20 minutes depending on your processor speed and internet connection. The inclusion of Beryl, the NTFS writing tool, Envy, NDISwrapper are all great! Beryl is great, as you can play with eye candy without having to bother with doing the install and download for instant gratification. The MintConfig menu provides easy access to the system intensive parts of modifications, including a graphical editor for the xorg.conf file for display configuration...

I am just going to return to Canonical's work and just play with a different flavor just to learn more about Linux. Sure, Mint was an Ubuntu derivative, but it needs more polish to make it really shine. Tomorrow, after work... I will either install Kubuntu or Xubuntu after I deem whichever package is suitable for my laptop Suzaku. If either of those just doesn't fit... I'll gladly do a fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04 and return Suzaku to it's former set-up. I do hope to learn more from my experiences to come tomorrow.

Edit: I am adding my "final" screenshots of my Mint Desktop as a final respect to my experiences.

My ISO for Linux Mint 3.0 finally finished today and I honestly couldn't wait to get home from work to try it out... I know that it was just on the back of my head just burning away at me. Being the geek I was, once the final minutes of closing time at the office came... I just couldn't wait to get home.

To set the mood... Linux Mint is an off-shoot of Ubuntu that hails its development from Ireland. (Trivia: Take a look at the older Linux Mint logos, look familiar?) It is compatible with Ubuntu .DEB files and also share a good deal of the Ubuntu repositories. The stable releases have feminine names (like this release is called Cassandra), while the unstable and bleeding edge new releases (i.e. - nightly builds) are named Romeo.  What makes Linux Mint so different? Here's what the Linux Mint site has to say about that:

Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

But on the evaluation of other users, Linux Mint is already preloaded with lots of multimedia codecs and other goodies. In essence, taking out a lot of the work that would have been required to support multimedia in the beginning. In addition to that... The look of the previous releases seem to be relaxed and tranquil. Let's get rolling and boot this ISO up on Suzaku!

Linux Mint 3.0 "Cassandra"
On loading up, the boot prompts looked very similar to the ones on the Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn LiveCD (Cassandra's base is Ubuntu after all). After selecting the choice to run the OS from the CD, the loading procedure begins. There's a stylized leaf logo with an "LM" inside the leaf with "Linux Mint" and then the motto of "from freedom came elegance". Below all of that was a smaller version of the Ubuntu loading bar in a leaf green color scrolling during the load-up. The OS would load automatically and log on as a demo user named "mint", something the other two distros did not add to their design into their LiveCD's. This was something done exactly on the dot. Once again, my widescreen 1200 x 800 resolution was detected without a problem.

After the basics of the OS loaded... I would notice that there was only one Gnome panel on the bottom. Not the dual Gnome panel set-up that Ubuntu or Fedora had. But that's where the unique nature of Linux Mint begins... From what I have observed, it can't be said that Linux Mint is completely Gnome based. It shares traits both from Gnome and KDE! This makes for a very unique fusion and definitely a refreshing take on a GUI. On the bottom left corner, there is the menu button but it opens to something unique and not standard to the Gnome scheme... I knew it looked familiar, so I jumped to the first place I thought I saw it... The openSUSE project by Novell. It's the Novell Gnome SLAB. On scouring Google about the Gnome SLAB, it turns out that it's actually quite difficult to implement into just any Linux distro... This was impressive enough to me. The ease of navigation and a more centralized design for the system commands was a pleasant experience. There seems to be a bit of KDE dependencies within the OS as amaroK is installed as the music jukebox program, rather than Rhythmbox.

Applications... There's quite a list of them, but it was odd to see that games were not included. I was impressed to see Beryl was available as well as the NTFS disk writing tool. The thing that impressed me most was the inclusion of NDISwrapper in the system tools menu. It's quite bold to have that, but makes it possible for users who have unsupported wifi cards to hop online by loading their Windows drivers. I do wish there was a little more applications to try out as system tools and all can only be tested so far. Beryl runs a little faster than my Ubuntu set-up which has me rethinking about Beryl configurations. All of the restricted Ubuntu modules are all loaded... Things like Sun Java are Adobe Flash are all here, making Linux Mint a good way for the Terminal fearing user to jump into Linux just to get the multimedia support up and rolling.

This LiveCD is a rather light weight environment, so application loading and window rendering is quite quick. Little lag is great to really have a bit of fun with a LiveCD. That may be due to the stripped down packages within the Linux Mint LiveCD, but it certainly helps the pleasant experience. The desktop's colors are pleasing to the eye and that will definitely create a welcoming environment for the potential convert. I will definitely keep a copy with me as this is one distro that I will definitely be watching.

Below are some screenshots for your viewing pleasure

I continue my reviewing of the Linux distros pulled this week. Fedora 7 was released this past Thursday, so I was glad to have hopped the torrent to pull the ISO's for both versions. Factor in Red Hat's involvement and you begin to understand how Fedora is really a great enterprise project for the Linux enthusiast.

Fedora was tested with my machine, Suzaku, for those curious...

Fedora 7
Fedora is a community version offshoot of the Red Hat Linux package that has finally found unification. Before, Fedora was spread over a number of CD ISO's or had to be burned on a DVD giving you a fully loaded OS. There was another option to burn a single CD install (known as Fedora Core) but that had you either adding extras via CD/DVD or the web.. Essentially you got the whole enchilada or you got nada. With the release of Fedora 7, The LiveCD was a great plan of attack. Fedora 7 by default is a Gnome environment. The artwork theme is "Flying High" which fits the mood of the distro as they have accomplished a lot for their 7th release.

The Fedora team took the time to create a very artistic GRUB bootloader screen. It has more of the "Flying High" balloon artwork skinned nicely to the GRUB bootloader. The GDM theme meshes very well into the theme but it is plagued by the same problem as PCLinuxOS, you're trapped at the log-in screen but a message under it has a count-down beff any Fedora KDE users want to chime in about getting that to work properly, I would appreciate it. ore it auto logs you in as Fedora. They could have done what Ubuntu's LiveCD does with a direct log-in to the OS as Gnome allows the option to do so.

The uSplash image that shows the procedure calls to load up Fedora 7 in Gnome is a themed image with a bland set of logos of all the tasks in loading. I was welcomed to a soothing blue and white theme and a great wallpaper of hot air balloons in an evening sky. Fedora was equipped with Avahi zeroconf for wi-fi networks, so picking up a wi-fi signal with a supported wi-fi card is good and dandy. I don't have another machine to test for unsupported cards and the presence of NDISwrapper, but I wouldn't assume that it's built into the LiveCD.

Fedora 7's package is a bit light for my tastes... Sure, you can use YUM to download and add modules/programs to the LiveCD, but you may want to have a good amount of RAM to try that, as I actually locked up from the system being overloaded from reading the CD and installing Beryl through Yum. If you're trying to gauge for stability, don't overload the procedures on the LiveCD as the need to read from the CD and run the OS completely on the RAM will not give an accurate idea of how the system can run. If you want more to play with... I would suggest holding out for the next review.

My only big pet peeve with Fedora 7 was the lack of built-in support for multimedia keys on laptops. Like earlier when I was trying to play with the Fedora 7 LiveCD in a coffee house... the loud sounds on boot were a bit embarrassing. For some reason, the keyboard shortcut association would not accept my hardware keys for the volume controls. I would have expected that the alsamixer would have been in the system tray at boot and not tucked away... but that's a whole different tangent. If any Fedora or Red Hat user would like to educate me or show me how to resolve that, I wouldn't mind.

Fedora 7 KDE
I was actually really more impressed with Fedora 7 KDE than I was with Fedora 7. Most of the things that I have said hold true even in the KDE version... Except for a few things...

The KDE shell is significantly lighter on the RAM usage than the Gnome shell. This has been common knowledge in the KDE vs. Gnome arguments, but the scale of the differences was almost dramatic. The wireless network manager in the KDE environment is the KNetworkManager which I am no stranger to, as my parent's Kubuntu machine uses it. Fedora has the KDE system bar set at a one level setting, which works well as to help go with their wonderful wallpaper.

The software library in the LiveCD of Fedora 7 KDE is significantly larger than the Fedora 7 LiveCD. You get to try a whole lot of software, like the KOffice suite, the K-Games suite... heck, even the Beryl packages to play with the Beryl window compositor. That impressed me a lot. The thing that scared me was the fact that in KDE with Beryl loaded and running from the Fedora 7 KDE LiveCD, my favorite burn effect was rendered better and faster than it is on Ubuntu Gnome! I would say that I liked the variety of software on the Fedora 7 KDE LiveCD more. The inclusion of the SELinux package was interesting, for those who are security paranoid... though not totally necessary.

Though Fedora 7 KDE was not without its flaws... Once again, I was unable to adjust my volume or mute with my hardware keys on Suzaku. On trying to associate my volume keys through KMixer, it wouldn't even recognize the media keys! Dynamic CPU scaling was not fully operational as I could not force the processor to run at pure performance mode or power-saver mode. In the Gnome version, Yum was accessible through the "Add/Remove Programs" button in the Gnome menu bar. I couldn't find the same KDE equivalent, unless I totally missed it... The last one was more of a bother than anything... On ending the LiveCD, Fedora does not force-eject the CD on finish. That means you'd have to forcibly eject the drive with the push button for a media drive or power up the machine and eject right on boot-up. Most of the other LiveCD distros eject right on shut down and then ask for the user to press enter to finish power-down.

Overall, I respect Fedora 7 and the KDE version... It is definitely not for the beginner, but I can say that both versions of Fedora 7 will be with me at all times. They have made it a nice polished release and hopefully, Things will get better once Fedora 8 rolls by. I was browsing some of the Fedora forums didn't quite reflect a newbie user friendly as I am acquainted to experience... The level of expertise is much higher in Fedora; I can understand why the level of knowledge must be higher to appreciate the Fedora project.

Many wonder what got me into Linux and Open Software and boy, do I have a story to tell.

Windows has frustrated me for a very long time. Viruses, worms, trojan horse root-kits, and anything of the like have pissed me off to no end for years... Anyone remember the good old Blaster worm? I happened to have Windows XP and on dial-up of all things. That was my first horrid encounter with computer security problems... I had to crash the RPC procedure call with Alt - Ctrl - Del and have the update slowly pull onto my machine, where I would locally load it into a floppy for my cousin and fix his machine. The download was an unbearable 3 - 4 hours... Then there was sharing my tower with my sister... It tracted so many viruses and malware that a low level wipe was the only saving grace that could pull the machine out of its misery. That low-level wipe ran me a good 5 - 8 hours. It would happen to me again and again with my machine. Then the event would finally break me open...

Here's an excerpt from my blog posted at Ubuntu Dallas, this documents the final battle I had with Windows being on my machine:

What began as a simple Friday night of post-work relaxation on my Windows XP machine, BEAST v5, became one of anger and madness. The date was February 9th at about 9:30pm, I logged on just to check forums, read the news, use Outlook for personal e-mails and just relax to some music to ease away a very stressful week. Unfortunately, the common plagues of the Windows world came knocking on my door this unfortunate night. My copies of ZoneAlarm and Spybot Search & Destroy threw all the warning bells saying malicious code was infecting my system but couldn't be removed. The annoying issue that arose from this was the constant pop-ups screaming that the virus' attempts to access the outside world were blocked. But it seems that the virus only got more infuriated at me and became more persistent, so persistent that it crashed my anti-viral and spyware protection and began eating my resources. This would ultimately turn my machine into a proverbial zombie...

To think, that mess came about when I planned to just play some Guild Wars! From that, I began soul searching for another operating system... I ran into Ubuntu Linux by Canonical and the rest is history.

I wanted to give back to the promise of open source as it has been good to me. I began to go join up the Ubuntu Dallas Local Team to help out users in the Dallas area. I was invited by the administrator Shawn to be a forum moderator. Eventually, I would be asked to help moderate the mailing list and eventually, being promoted to assistant administrator! I have been proud of my promotion and even more proud to be of service of to Canonical in the Dallas area.

I have converted 3 machines. Two being my own, a desktop called BEAST v5 and a laptop known as Suzaku. They have served me well since the conversion and they have been reliable as a rock. I assisted in salvaging a friend's HP Media Center PC which proved to be a great task. I have shown friends my hard work and it is great!

Enclosed with this post are images and video of my machine. The pictures are more recent work of Suzaku, as I have been trying to perfect the "Burn" effect to run smoothly and rendered damn well.