Inspirated

“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” — Khalil Gibran

The idea of visualizing the history of Microsoft on four sides of a desktop cube does sound enthralling no matter how much you despise the company’s products. That’s precisely the reason why I spent a whole night trying to configure four different operating systems to run virtualized on QEMU/KVM with networking and multimedia capabilities. The results look good, especially when you have a compositing window manager to extrapolate their effects.

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Video screenshots

Hardware Information

Software Information

Note: Windows 98 and 95 don’t like KVM at all, so I had to run their respective virtual machines with the -no-kvm switch.

Here’s my first attempt at podcasting a video of the kick-ass hardware accelerated window manager:

Download the podcast (MP4)

Beryl’s own capture plugin was painfully slow, so I had to capture the video with my Nokia N72. The clip lasts for about a minute, but shows plenty of effects to achieve the ‘wow’ factor (most notably, the toying with the x11 output of MPlayer video).

While lurking in the IRC chatroom for KVM, I asked people about the problem that had been bothering me for weeks i.e. invisible mouse pointer in QEMU. Quite patiently, I waited for an answer and bingo! A user with the nickname ‘dignome’ found the solution in the first shot: run QEMU with SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE environment variable set to 0. The mouse pointer finally started appearing in the emulator by doing that, and after assigning another hundred megabytes of memory, my new virtual machine was shining and ready for some practical usage. (more…)

A new version version has been released for everyone’s favorite hardware accelerated window manager. New features include window thumbnail generation in the taskbar, an opacify plugin (making all other windows transparent while mouse is hovering above one) and a rewritten (relatively) more user-friendly settings manager. (more…)

Anyone who has ever tried to run Beryl using AIGLX must’ve heard about the infamous white cube issue. (more…)

It’s finally here, and everyone is talking about it. Microsoft’s new operating system promises a revolution in computing, and a safer experience for its users. (more…)

Xfce is a light-weight desktop environment which, in my opinion, balances the resources vs. features graph in the best possible way. (more…)