October 17, 2007
“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” — Khalil Gibran
| Link | Playable by | Resolution | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compiz-Fusion.mp4 | iPod, QuickTime, MPlayer, VLC Media Player | 320×240 | 1.19 MB |
| Compiz-Fusion.mpg | Windows Media Player, MPlayer, VLC Media Player | 352×288 | 10.21 MB |
| Compiz-Fusion.ogg | MPlayer, VLC Media Player | 1280×960 | 28.35 MB |
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| Setup | |
|---|---|
| Distribution | Linux From Scratch |
| Desktop Environment | Xfce |
| Window Manager | Compiz-Fusion |
April 29, 2007
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.
Video screenshots
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 @ 1.86GHz |
| Motherboard | Intel DG965RY |
| RAM | 512 MB |
| Host Operating System | Linux From Scratch |
| Host Kernel | Linux 2.6.21 |
| Host Virtualization Setup | QEMU 0.9.0/KVM-20 |
| Desktop Environment | Beryl 0.2.0/Xfce 4.4.1 |
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.
April 7, 2007
Here’s my first attempt at podcasting a video of the kick-ass hardware accelerated window manager:
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).
March 18, 2007
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.
Inspirated on Internet Explorer 6
From now on, I won’t have to boot to Windows to check my IE rendering bug fixes. Sound problems have also been fixed by passing the -soundhw es1370 flag to QEMU.
Things are perfect for now. My next aim would be to install different operating systems, virtualize them simultaneously and show each instance running a different side of the desktop cube on Beryl. Something tells me that it would be one of the most kick-ass screenshots of my entire life.
Tags: Beryl, Emulator, KVM, Open Source, QEMU, Technology, Virtual machineMarch 17, 2007
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.
Taskbar window thumbnail generation and the new settings manager
The new settings manager can still be quite perplexing for newbies, but at least steps in right directions are being taken. Resizing windows has also been improved a little bit (my X server doesn’t crash whenever I attempt it). As far as I can tell, Compiz’s days of glory are almost over, Beryl has just got too much open-source-ness to be rivaled by a cathedral project.
Tags: Beryl, Compiz, Open Source, Technology, X, X.orgFebruary 1, 2007
Anyone who has ever tried to run Beryl using AIGLX must’ve heard about the infamous white cube issue. While facing this problem, the screen goes totally white and while you can rotate the cube, you can’t do pretty much anything else. As I had also spent about a week trying various methods to solve the problem, I thought to publish on my blog the combination that did work on my Intel G965 motherboard.
Apparently, the whole thing is messed up because of the opcode changes in glproto-1.4.8 and although I don’t have any idea why, downgrading glproto and recompiling Mesa and X.Org did not solve the problem for me. Nevertheless, the following setup worked like a charm:
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/proto/glproto
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/mesa
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/xserver
Compiling these components might require you to install other ones (such as inputproto, damageproto etc.), but this page is not meant to be a HOWTO. I’m just confirming that the above mentioned things work for me on my Intel graphics card. There is even a new patch created for xorg-server but I haven’t tried it out myself yet (I’m away form my PC for at least another week). If anyone else can confirm some other combination to be working, I’ll be glad to list it here. Just leave a comment using the form below.
Tags: AIGLX, Beryl, G965, Intel, Mesa, Technology, X, X.orgJanuary 30, 2007
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. But, anyone who keeps himself in touch with Linux news knows that our beloved operating system kicks Vista in the pants in every technical aspect worth considering. Honestly speaking, that won’t change much as the fan-boys will blatantly remain fan-boys, no matter what you throw at them and how rational your reasoning is. Still, I thought of comparing the the current states of Linux and Vista desktops so that I’d link any future Vista fan that I encounter directly to this post.
Let’s start …
In October 2001, Microsoft launched the latest version, dubbed as XP, of their flagship product Windows. The company claimed that the new version was its “most secure operating system ever made”. While installing the OS, the screens constantly kept reiterating words such as “security, usability and dependability”. Given that most of the Microsoft’s users are people who know as much about security as I do about Organic Chemistry, the marketing tactic indeed proved quite successful. However, it wasn’t long before crackers, virus writers and trojan makers started targeting XP, and the most secure OS of Microsoft was collectively devastated. To remedy the situation, Microsoft came up with Service Pack 2. This time using taglines such as “latest security updates and innovations from Microsoft”. These “new proactive protection features” were nothing more than a collection of fixed bugs, default firewall and a “Security Center” that constantly bugged you about installing an Anti-Virus on your PC. The Anti-Viruses had to run in background to perform their routine tasks, and as a consequence, you were left with lesser resources to do your work. It was almost impossible to edit multiple spreadsheets efficiently in Office while having Norton’s AV “shield” your PC from known threats.
The common misconception about Windows’ inherent security troubles was that Windows is less secure only because it’s more targeted by malicious crackers. It was useless telling people who believed it that Windows only dominates the desktop side of computing; and that more damage could’ve been achieved by crackers if they targeted *nix operating systems (which dominated and still dominate the server side of computing) and they had been flawed in security like Windows. The actual reasons for Windows being horse crap in terms of security were quite different. The initial versions of Windows were never created as a network operating system, and the situation became ugly only when the later versions were used as one. There was no proper privilege system in Windows, and even XP’s firewall filtered only inbound traffic. Ironically, with Vista, Microsoft is implementing long time security practices that *nix operating systems have always had, and flagging their operating system (once again) as “more secure operating system than any other”. Things like file system encryption, firewall and a user privilege system were present in real networking operating systems like FreeBSD and Linux for a long time before Microsoft even considered adding them to Windows. In fact, it still astonishes many seasoned *nix users that millions of Windows PCs used to connect to the internet without a proper firewall and a user privilege system. The funniest thing about the whole phenomenon is that Microsoft is tagging the whole thing is “innovation”. Leaving that aside, even if we consider the current states of security features for Vista and a Linux operating system, Vista still lags behind due to technologies like SELinux, iptables and the platform portable nature of Linux itself.
Another feature of Vista which admirers love to brag about is the Aero interface, while the misconception (which wasn’t a misconception really, quite a few years back) about Linux is that the GUIs of its desktop environments aren’t as user friendly and aesthetically pleasing as Macintosh or Windows. Recent developments such as Xgl, AIGLX, Beryl and Cairo have provided Linux the most impressive GUIs of any operating system, and I’m not just issuing hollow statements like Microsoft here either. Consider having multiple “virtual” desktops on a cube which you can rotate and view in real-time. Right now, it’s only possible with a hardware accelerated X server like Xgl or AIGLX.
Beryl: The most advanced GUI interface on any OS
And let’s not forget that you have something in Linux which Windows will never be able to offer: the choice of desktop environments. So if you don’t want to have all those effects, or even if you have a computer with only 64 MB of RAM, you can always run a minimalist window manager e.g. Fluxbox.
There are also other “innovations” of Vista such as desktop widgets and search tools which have been present in Linux for years in form of SuperKaramba and Beagle. Nevertheless, as I’ve said before, the “ignorant fan-boy syndrome” has no cure, and there will still be people who’ll find it very satisfying to pay money for things like operating system, office software and email management software. Even when a Linux distribution offers gigabytes of those utilities for free (in terms of both beer and speech).
Tags: Aero, AIGLX, Beagle, Beryl, Cairo, Linux, Microsoft, Open Source, Sarcasm, SuperKaramba, Technology, Vista, Xgl, XPXfce is a light-weight desktop environment which, in my opinion, balances the resources vs. features graph in the best possible way. Until last week, the latest stable version of Xfce was 4.2, while 4.4 release candidates had been rolling out since mid-2006. The 4.4 version promised some very exciting features, such as the new Thunar File Manager but was, not surprisingly, never incorporated in mainstream distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu. Fans continued to compile it from source or install unofficial builds on their distributions, but there was no significant increase in its usage over this period as the general expectations of a modern desktop environment were lifted due to relatively shorter stable release cycles of Gnome and KDE. The situation should be changed now that Xfce has finally released the much awaited stable upgrade.
Xfce was one of the first desktop environments to include its own compositing manager with its default window manager. The whole thing was quite sexy without taking huge chunks of memory either. In my experience, an Xfce desktop can look really cool while using only 80-100 MB of RAM. Back in the days when I had Xfwm4 as my default window manager, the setup shown in the following screenshot ran quite smoothly on a 733 MHz P3 with 128 MB of RAM!
Xfce 4.4 RC2 on Fedora Core 6
(No one can deny the fact though that once someone uses Beryl/Emerald, all other window managers of the universe start to look ultra-boring. That’s why my normal setup consists of both Beryl and Xfce, and it’s quite a treat.)
I’ll be reviewing the 4.4 release as soon as I get back to my PC in February. It’s really hard being away from your beloved C2D processor that compiles a whole kernel in 20 minutes, and using a P3 processor which compiles the same thing in approximately two hours. It’s like going to a movie with a talkative nauseous wife after having seen the same thing with a gorgeous taciturn girlfriend on the night before!
Tags: Beryl, Emerald, Fedora Core, Gnome, KDE, Open Source, Technology, Thunar, Xfce
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