Uncategorized
A Cutting Edge Linux Desktop
Folks, this is what’s being done on Linux these days. My desktop is very similar to this. I don’t have all of these features enabled because I don’t currently have a powerful CPU, but this is a lot closer to mine than anything else I could find on Youtube. The window manager is called Beryl, and it is what is causing these effects, including the 3D cube (Skydome) effect and all of the neat things done with the windows. For all the hype about Vista’s “Aero” desktop, Microsoft could only do about 1% of this. Maybe open source really is better than proprietary? In case you’re wondering, this fellow is using Ubuntu, with the Gnome desktop, using Beryl as the WM, with what looks like full desktop effects enabled. The total cost of the software on this computer is $0.00
Discussion
26 Comments
Leave a Reply
Buy Scott's Stickers
Social Bookmarks
Yep. Pretty amazing what free software can do today. But even more amazing to me is that anyone, ANYONE, would even consider running some Windoze or Mac bloatware on his computers. I honest to God don’t get it. Right now I am using, among other things (Debian, gNewSense, FreeBSD) a lot of Ubuntu with Gnome (exactly what the guy in the video is using) and I have never, ever seen an OS which is so easy to install and run. Believe it or not, I find Windoze actually hard to use. And I used to code win32 in my past life. I have even seen some friends running Windows Vista AND a Windows XP emulator (because some of their software only ran on WXP). Can you imagine that, the same shit, but only SQUARED. Needless to say, it crashed all the time.
Now Mac OSX does seem better than the former OS9, but talk about a totally out of control piece of bloatware. This stuff is so sluggish that you cannot run it unless you have the very latest proc and plenty of RAM. One of my machines runs Ubuntu on a 333MHz proc with 128RAM and while it sure does not look like a supercomputer the thing works decently. Costs? Zero. Ubuntu is free and the computer came from a trash heap (literally).
I have several computers at home (intel) all running several flavors of Debian, I also use FreeBSD (mainly for hardware diagnostics). my two laptops both run gNewSense (a 100% free version of Debian and Ubuntu) and I have a totally awesome Nokia N800 Internet Tablet which also runs on a Debian GNU/Linux based operating system (Maemo). With all this I email, browse, edit sound and picture, write in several languages, blog, study, read, listen to music, convert audio and video file formats, I use SSH or Bluetooth to connect the machines to each other, I use VOIP (Gizmo) to make cheap phone calls abroad, I stream internet radio in pretty much any format, I watch Iranian TV news, listen to Russian radio, etc. There is nothing I cannot do, and that with a yearly hardware budget of about 200$ (N800 excluded) and with NO viruses, NO crashes, NO script kiddie intrusion, NO problems whatsoever. None.
Why do people continue to actually make themselves miserable with shitty software, overpriced (and mostly crappy) hardware and even agree to PAY for that?!?!?
How did the vast majority of people with presumably access to free information end up making such pathetic choices?!
Even Ron Paul opposes ‘net neutrality’ and speaks of Bill Gates as a good model for fairly made money(!!!).
I just don’t get it.
I’m a dedicated Kubuntu user, but Beryl still has a small ways to go in terms of system stability.
Just cut out the eye-candy nonsense.
@Greg: Just cut out the eye-candy nonsense I agree completely, and I suspect that so would Ozymandias since most GNU/Linux users are probably CLI types anyway (I sure am). Personally, all this eye candy is just a waste of CPU power, but for those who do like that kind of stuff, this sure beats any “jaguar safaris” or, even more so, aeros.
Proud ubuntu user right here.
ubuntu this http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/world/middleeast/31attack.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
When are those insurgents gonna become better shots?
Just curious, what CPU do you guys use….
I have no idea what ya’ll are talking about.
Kubuntu even comes in a Kurdish version.
Reminded me of when I was broke a few years ago. Got me a refurbed Dell from eBay and loaded SUSE on it. Browsed Monster for jobs and wrote a resume on OpenOffice. And as soon as I got a job — bought desktop w/ XP and Office 2003 and ditched the linux. Why? Cuz most of the real productivity software runs on Windows or Mac. Adobe Indesign or Quark? Doesn’t run on Linux. Photoshop? Nope. MS Word? Nope. &c., &c. It’s true, if you’re just a web surfer who never has to actually accomplish anything or publish anything, Linux is better. But if you want want the real productivity apps which the tech industry has created w/ 30 years and billions of dollars to make you more productive, it’s Windows/Mac.
@Bob Bogus - my slowest in 333, my fastest 1 gig.
@Big_Sheikh - please check out the following:
http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html
http://www.winehq.org/
Also, major corporations, cities and entire government administrations have fully moved to Linux. SAP or Oracle run on Linux. IBM invested several billion dollars on Linux. Amazon.com, CNN.com and the NYSE run on Linux. 75% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run on Linux, including 4/5 of the 5 top ones ( please take a look at this http://www.top500.org/charts/list/29/osfam ).
I guess all they do is browsing
@Greg, I haven’t seen any stability problems in quite a while here.
@VS, I like the eye candy, and I actually find some of the features useful too, like the one that lets you look at a window in “negative” colour mode. And Windows is hard to run, no question about it.
@Bogus, I have an Athlon XP 2600+, which is so out of date I don’t think you can buy them anymore. My RAM runs at a paltry 333mhz, and that means Vista is out of the question, but I can still run Ubuntu with Beryl no problem.
@Big_Sheikh, you are a couple of years out of date. I run XP using a virtual machine. I can boot it inside Linux and run all of the programs you’re referring to. It has USB and internet access, and can access my personal files through a share. The one and only thing it cannot do (yet) is run 3D games, because Linux cannot yet supply it with enough acceleration, so DirectX is disabled. The VM I use is called VirtualBox. It was very easy to set up.
@Ozymandias, Big_Sheikh has no interest in 3D games, the man is a *professional* who runs *real* software like Quark and even MS Word
What’s this nonsense about no productivity on Linux?
Who needs Adobe Photoshop when there’s Gimp? Who needs Windows Office when there’s Open Office? I mean, I was using Open Office when I was running XP. I send documents to a lot of places all around the world and I’ve never had anyone request that I resend anything on MS Word because I can save everything in OO as a Word document. And with Linux I did not have to go into the OS to tweak its security like I had to with XP–like closing all the open ports.
Also on XP I used Commodo firewall and ClamWin, both open source programs. When my old HD died, it was time to load up the new one with Kubuntu.
Maybe the best thing about Linux is that there’s nothing in the OS to track you, to verify that your version is “authentic,” there’s no Big Brother.
Maybe one day MS will be desktop ready and will drop the Big Brother act but, until then, forget it.
@Mizgin - I am delighted to see you posting here. I have great respect for you and am hope to hear your comments on any subject (BTW - drop by to my blog and please comment on this one: http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2007/08/subverting-iran-washingtons-covert-war.html ). Concerning Linux, of course only someone blindly trusting the corporate media would utter such nonsense about it only being good for browsing. Heck, even some corporate folks are getting fed up with Microsoft’s garbage. Read this amazing editorial by, of all things, a PC MAG editor:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2171472,00.asp
And, of course, you are quite correct: Big Brother really wants you to use NSA co-developed software which brings billions of dollars into the pocket of American turbocapitalists like scumbags like Gates.
“@Bogus, I have an Athlon XP 2600+, which is so out of date I don’t think you can buy them anymore. My RAM runs at a paltry 333mhz”
Don’t feel bad, Mr. Oz. Right now I’m typing this on an Athlon Thunderbird 1.33 GHz system and the RAM runs at 266 mhz. But it’s good enough for the stuff I do in XP.
But the question is: does it run DOS?
Seriously, I’ve been using WordStar for DOS since 1986, and I still use it. I prefer it to Open Office (which I use to create MS Word .doc files).
I bought another XP laptop last year because I wanted to avoid Vista, which I figure will be even less DOS-friendly.
I bought Dreamweaver earlier this year, but I still create my websites using NetScape Composer (the 1998 edition). I think my websites look fine.
So, DOES Linux run DOS programs? Will it print to an old parallel port printer? Will it print DOS programs via a USB port?
DOS, eh? Somewhere around here I got an old 386 that’s got a DOS partition on it. I think it also has Windows for Workgroups on it. Linux probably has some kind of DOS emulation software.
And somewhere around here I got an old TS 1000 (Timex/Sinclair). It’s got a whole 2Kb of RAM, no hard drive, a membrane keyboard and no monitor. Ya hook it up to a TV!
Hey Scott, what kinda ‘puter do ya got?
@Thomas - there are plenty of DOS emulators with linux including: bochs, dosbox, dosemu and probably many others. you can also multiboot. lastly, I heard that there are free dos versions out there, which are still supported (unlike MS DOS). plenty of choices here.
I got a brand new one with a dual core jam in it and XP cause I heard Vista was the worst, but I’m only using that computer to do the streaming and online controls for the KAOS server, phone, etc. during the show. Else, I got AMD sumthin-er-other, also XP that has all my programs on it, including my recording jammer. I gotta crappy Dell that plays the music and that’s about it, and I got a couple year old compaq laptop which is mostly just the back up recorder machine right now, though If I could keep it quieter, I’d like to use it for surfing and email during the show so the regular computer can just record - occasionally there’s some hickups in it - but the mic would pick it up now.
Anyone know why my computer restarts when I tell it to shut down?
would any of yous guys like to update the list o’ interviewees on my wikipedia page - it wouldn’t be seemly for me to do it, but it’s bad outta date.
>Kubuntu even comes in a Kurdish version.
Dang it, if I gain any more weight I’m gonna be running Chubuntu. I gotta get some excercise….
>I gotta get some excercise….
Plus, stop eatin’ like a pig, er I mean an Amerikan.
I gotta eat more and exercise less.
>Anyone know why my computer restarts when I tell it to shut down?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311806
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/russel_02may13.mspx
Dang Scott, ya got a lot of hardware and a fancy pants dual core CPU! Not bad, not bad at all…
Speakin’ a dual core I picked up this notebook a few weeks back for my work. (I gotta run Vista for some testing plus some other work stuff.) Anyway, got it for $449 at Best Buy. It ain’t a Core 2 Duo, it’s Pentium but still not bad…
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8404158&type=product&id=1180743304365
Thank you site!!!
1pofasgdmao
2dofasgdmao
2wofasgdmao
4fofasgdmao
5hofasgdmao
6yofasgdmao
Bye!!!