Archive for October, 2006
Ubuntu Dapper with Beryl/XGL
I installed Beryl/XGL on Ubuntu Dapper over the weekend using these instructions. I then selected the Wombat theme and customised it to look like the image above. As you can see, you are able to create some really cool glassy effects with your window manager. If you are interested in the Sunrise theme, then feel free to download it from here, and import it into your Emerald Theme manager. You can download the background image from here.
Beryl provides some eye candy for the linux desktop. If you are a Mac user, then you’ll feel right at home… well almost. You can minimise windows with the genie effect or select a running application a la Exposé. Switching desktops is similar to switching user accounts on the Mac, which is done through a rotating cube effect.
Something different is the wobbly effect that seems to turn your windows to jelly when you move them around the screen. This was cool for like 2 minutes, until I started feeling nauseous, so I disabled it.
For a 0.1 release, Beryl is quite impressive. However, it seems to crash a lot. In fact it crashed twice whilst I was trying to write this blog entry.
Pink for October
Bugger… I missed out on the NBCF Treasure Hunt this year. Nathan, how come you didn’t organise it this year? Probably for the same reason I didn’t organise it… just too damn busy. I wouldn’t have had time to work on the team t-shirts this year. Last year’s Average Joes t-shirts were a success, and I doubt I could have topped that effort this year.
Anyway, the National Breast Cancer Foundation is a worthy cause, and so to show my support my blog header is going Pink for October.
This site is now TextDriven
Today I migrated my site over to TextDrive. It was a simple migration, but I still need to fix up email. I guess I will just have to wait until the MX rules propagate across the network.
Anyway I should be thanking David Peterson for the hosting he has provided me for the past year. I’ve decided to have a go at podcasting, and I couldn’t chew up bandwidth that way on David’s box, which hosts a few critical sites. So I’ve moved to TextDrive to use up their bandwidth. 
