i am huge in japan

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Ooh fancy

No surprise to anyone, I now have XGL/Beryl running on my work and home computers. Work went flawless but at home I tried to be fancy with AIGLX and beta Nvidia drivers and it all went very badly. So tried again the normal way and it worked.

Beryl is a good improvement over Compiz. I like the improved settings manager and the default settings aren't too crazy. Being able to change the window decorations in high detail with the Emerald Theme Manager is also a welcome addition.

At work I have am still running the default Edgy Eft theme but at home I changed to a modified Adonis_Mod theme.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Edgy on desktop

So Edgy Eft has gone on my work pc and my home pc. Both installs have been without complications. Work needed the 1920x1200 resolution manually put in to xorg.conf but I was expecting that.

By default my home pc booted to login in 29 seconds. I got stuck in and busted that down to 20 seconds. I'm sure it will rise again when I install VMWare but it's a nice achievement all the same. I'll use what I've learnt to try and cut down the laptop boot time but there's not a lot I can do as part of speeding up the desktop was removing features the laptop uses.

I've had a look over guides for installing Beryl (a fork of Compiz) but I am not ready to take that jump yet. Soon my desktop ADD will kick in and I'll change things.

Now the 6 month wait for Feisty Fawn begins! ;)

Monday, October 23, 2006

Trackpad blues

So the one thing that bothered me about my new laptop was the trackpad. I was constantly making mistakes on things because my hand would hit the trackpad. Tap to click was enabled. On my laptop it was quite easy to disable. Just had to add to the trackpad section of my xorg.conf:

Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

This fix is detailed at Ubuntu:Chronicles

Saturday, October 21, 2006

So edgy

Unable to wait another week, I got the Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Release Candidate ISO from a friend and installed it on my laptop. It went smoothly and after a couple of updates installs I had the new artwork and bootsplash. The change is quite refreshing.

Boot time so far is 30 seconds. I'm sure I can drop it down a notch with a bit of tweaking. I am very curious to see how fast the dual core desktop boots but I shall wait for the final release for that.

This time I tried using Automatix2 instead of EasyUbuntu for my multimedia codec needs. Quite a good interface but much the same result :)

Thankfully the wireless still works out of the box!

Saturday, October 14, 2006

portable!



So I broke down and a laptop finally. After almost getting a cheap new Dell I opted for a nearly new Acer Aspire 3624. It has better compatibility with Ubuntu out of the box. I am writing this with it now via wireless of course. In a couple of weeks I will throw Edgy Eft on it.

Specs:
Celeron M 1.6 GHz
1.3 GB of RAM
40 GB HDD
14.1" widescreen
Cd writer.
Integrated ethernet
Atheros wireless.
2.3 Kg

I was hesitant of getting a Celeron but the huge amount of RAM in it makes it really snappy and perfect for what I want to use it for. I'm glad it's a true 14" widescreen too and not a 14" in a 15" casing. It was more than I wanted to pay for a second hand but less than for a new one. So a good compromise.