Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops,
I’m sure you’ll ask yourself where’s the difference between compiz
and beryl.See it this way, what options do you have if you want to check
something on your desktop or another window, if a window is already
placed on top of it.

Sure, you can minimize the window, move the window or even close
it. You may use taskwitching, window transparency might work as
well.
But how about, just taking a quick look behind a window border or
corner, like what you would do if it’s just a piece of paper. Watch
this:

Beryl is a fork of the compiz 3D
desktop composition manger for Linux.

Apple’s Aqua graphical user-interface was the absolute leader in
eye-candy desktops for home computers. Now Linux can offer a quite
similar but also further extended desktop environment like on
Mac’s. The new XServer with integrated OpenGL support Xgl, enables
owners of 3D graphics cards in their computers to use the new
compiz
framework to draw their favourite desktop like Gnome or
KDE in a
3D context. Thus enabling beautiful window-effects and workspace
usage-features never seen before. Check it out here:

WARNING: The only distribution at the moment which enables compiz
by default on supported hardware at the moment is the latest Fedora
Linux. Although you can easily enable compiz on Gentoo Linux,
Ubuntu and others, there’s still some things to do by hand which
requires a lot of reading howto’s, especially if you want to
fallback to your old “working” configuration.

This one is for all lovers of Apple’s
PC vs. Mac commercials.
If you’re still unsure whether to buy Sony’s upcoming PS3 or
Nintendo’s Wii, watch this:

Just in case you missed the original ones, go here: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Ikea is now using Apple iMacs for their catalogue
decorations.
Now there’s two possibilities why they’re doing that.
1) Ikea’s design really sucks, so they need to focus attention to
something else.
2) The table is built so weak that it would fall into pieces when
it had to hold a PC.Now take the survey:

Finally, all my windows “not Microsoft ” are
renewed.

This time the workers did a real good job and also fix all the
remaining problems from my last window(s) de-installation.

Man, I like that windows
de-installation thing

Now, as soon as my budget will allow it, I can start buying my
final furniture. I’m quite happy now, except for the window
cleaning. 8-(

Another day of Windows de-installation

Wooohh, I love that sentence…
.

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X
release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major
release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating
system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation
software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q

Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a
universal binary, which means that it will provide near native
performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like
Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo
Linux as it doesn’t need to translate all the
CPU operations to a foreign architecture.

Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image
from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a
harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work
perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked
myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I’m not missing a single application that I had used before on
win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own
application if I’ll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.

Finally I decided to delete all the
Fedora trash from my epia.Since I found some good howto’s for debian I gave Debian
Sarge
a chance which installed fairly easy, and most important,
rather
minimalistic. But again it lacks the newest kernel features
that will support my newer DVB-T card Terratec Cinergy 1400,
as well as framebuffer-support for the Epia M10000.

Fortunately, after some frickling, I managed to backport the
DVB
stuff into the older “newest” debian development kernel,
and also the via-frambuffer driver.

A bigger problem was the DRM/DRI drivers which refused to
compile
for my debian kernel, with some strange missing symbol
errors…
Anyway Mythtv is now up and running, although without
hardware
mpeg accelleration.
Menuloading is a real pain in the ass, and also channel
switching,
but timeshifting and the EPG works great anyway…

On the internet I found an article on “KnoppMyth” which
promised
to work “out of the box(from CD)” on a Epia system…
waahhh….

After a short try, I realized that it works also without
accelleration
and further needs a huge desktop installation….
Not to mention the missing support for my DVB card, but OK.

I really wonder that after those many years of DVB
introduction
it’s still impossible to buy a settopbox which has all
features
built in.

For example Pinnacle’s Showcenter (a streaming-client) can be
combined
with a streaming server PC which has a PCTV card (analogue or
DVB)
so it is possible to programm it like a VCR. But the only way to
see
Live-TV is to programm a channel via Showcenter, wait for the
recording
to start and then pickup the file inside the videolist and play
it.

That’s simply bullshit….