Compiz in KDE

So I got bored and installed XGL/Compiz under KDE. It works mostly well but since some versioning issues forced me to use compiz-gnome instead of compiz-kde it's a little bit iffy. I've had to manually change font size settings to stop things being wither very small or very big.

I'm glad to see Compiz configuration has gotten easier under Ubuntu but I still had to disable most of the features in the wobbly plugin because no settings I chose made it less wobbly.

Having some urgent notify issues in Gaim to work through but otherwise it's ok. I guess if I really wanted to I could move back to GNOME but we'll see.

Only a couple of months until the new Ubuntu comes out, Edgy Eft. I read that will come with AIGLX turned on by default (instead of XGL) which you can then run Compiz on top of. I'm curious to see how that works out.

Tecra M5

I have been building a Tecra M5 at work. We use Windows 2000 there which hasn't worked too well with flashy features on new laptops, until now. The finger print reader worked! I spent a day logging on to Windows by swiping my print across the reader - easy. Until it started to shock me most of the time - ouchy.

After investigating the implications of this technology it was decided to disable it anyway. It's a great feature for a personal laptop but for a business one where the user is not the admin it's troublesome. Fears of locked out data abound.

The sound driver supplied by Toshiba would not install under 2000. I managed to find a copy of the file that would install though - with a little file grabbing out of the modem install archive. I then received a cd with 'Windows 2000' drivers for it - a later version number that did install fine. Oddly the hacky version I got was the same version number as the XP one. Nice work there Toshiba.

Googling for the sound driver I found that the sound card is very hard/impossible to get going under Linux currently. Boo-urns.

Nice laptop though, shiny and light.

My work desktop

Kubuntu with Ksmoothdock and a small transparent kicker in the top right to house the system tray. Imagine the image being a glorious 24 inches diagonal.

I switched to Kubuntu at work in a clever way. I didn't want to download all the packages because of charges so I copied my home /var/cache/apt/archives/ folder to a usb drive and took it to work. I could then pasted the contents into my work folder and did an aptitude install kubuntu-desktop. It had to download very little which was great. A few packages had trouble and had to be redownloaded but for the most part a success.

Kubuntu

So once again getting aggravated at the still broken SUSE 10.1 package/update management I decided to blow it away and put Kubuntu on instead. I started with Ubuntu and aptituded kubuntu-desktop on over top. I pre-changed my repositories to include KDE 3.5.3 to save downloading it separately. After applying some updates and whatnot, all the KDE settings disappeared. I had to manually reconfigure everything.

Two days later (after upgrading to KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.14.2) I see the announcement that KDE 3.5.4 and GNOME 2.14.3 are out. Sigh. I haven't applied the updates yet but will shortly. I delayed the KDE because Kubuntu.org posted a warning saying the current build would keep kubuntu default settings from applying - the same error I had with 3.5.3 which makes me wonder if they are related.

GRUB to Login is currently 35 seconds.