Ever since I saw my first screenshot of what using a compositing manager can do to your desktop, I’ve been itching to try my hand at it. With my recent upgrade to Kubuntu Dapper Beta, along with my trusty NVidia card, I now had nothing but procrastination holding me back. Naturally, this means I’ve been sitting on this project for way to long, but today I sucked it in, strapped myself to my PC, bit the leather and gave it a go.

I figured it would be a big hassle, but following this guide found on the (K)Ubuntu forums, I was up and running composite windows in about five minutes. Everything looks good and stable. It’s fucking sweet! I now have configurable glass-like window translucency, drop-shadows and a really nice fade-in/out effect that a screenshot obviously cannot do justice.

I still have a good amount of tweaking to find that nice middle ground between sweet-ass eye-candy and usability, but one thing I realize right away is the need for a suitably cooler desktop wallpaper. Something heavy on the year 2535, I think—another project for me to procrastinate on.

Now with all this graphical sweetness all up in my display, all I have left to do is try my hand at setting up and running XGL and Compiz.

Liron-Freaking-Fishypants-WTF-OMFG-Tocker aka Cheeseball Deluxe in response to my post on moving to Kubuntu Dapper Beta asks:

Ever since I had been trying out all sorts of “community” versions of Mandrake/Mandriva, I’ve stopped being an early-adopter. I’ve never had any pleasant experieces with pre-release versions of operating systems, since I have a low level of tolerance and most of the stuff I use my computer for on a daily basis is “mission critical” (read: “work”). However, I’ve been looking for a reason to move away from Mandriva for a short time, as I personally don’t feel the evolution taking place. Being a simple end-user and not a programmer, if I don’t see or feel this evolution it’s a bad, bad sign. More people are moving away from Mandriva as we speak.

My question is this: Would you recommend Kubuntu over other linux os’? If so, why? Do you believe it’s more capable than other distros you have used? If so, in which ways?

I’d definitely recommend Kubuntu over other Linux-based OS—but I’d take it with a grain of salt. My experience in home use has always primarily been Debian-based OS. Since you use Mandriva, like me, you are used to having access to repositories and using apt-get and whatnot. I like it. I prefer it. I’m very inclined to stay in that sandbox.

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A few nights ago, I upgraded to the latest Dapper beta for Kubuntu. After a failed attempt last week at doing a dist-upgrade to Flight 6 that caused all kinds of catastrophic errors and having to wipe and reinstall Breezy 5.10 (thankfully I had the presence of mind to make a backup of my home folder), I decided to just do a clean install from CD. I already had pretty much everything backed up and there was really nothing to lose and hey, it’s Beta, right?

While I realize that I spoiled my geeky Xmas morning delight of being able to upgrade to Dapper final on June 1st, fuck it. I’ve always hated waiting for goodies and shee-it, the move was totally worth my while. Dapper is hot.

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Last night, I came home and booted my Kubuntu box as I usually do. About five minutes into checking my email, my beloved and enormous CRT monitor went black. I tried Alt+F’ing to a command line, thinking it was an X issue, but I couldn’t get anything on the monitor. So, I tried a reboot—no luck. All I had was a blank and black screen, yet the little green light on the monitor was telling me that the monitor seemed to be getting a signal. I tried the monitor on another Ubuntu box I keep lying around. Nothing. Blackness as dark as my soul at that thin, bleak moment, faced with the prospect of getting through the night deprived of that warm and lovely cathode glow.

At this point I fell back upon the time honored and trusted method of hardware repair known as “Smacking the Shit Out of Your Gear”. I began placing several surgical and precise whompings along the sides of the monitor casing. My inner caveman assured me that he knew what he was doing.

Suddenly, while in the midst of whacking, there came a loud pop from the guts of my monitor and a curl of smoke drifted out of the vents in the back. The damn thing was dead. I told myself that my whacking was a mercy killing, rather than the coup de grâce.

I now have a schmancy flatpanel LCD. My lovely cathode ray tan is starting to fade. I miss my old monitor.

It’s very frustrating when I can’t get a program from my Linux distro’s repositories. Ubuntu and Kubuntu share the same repos and while there’s a huge array of applications available there, not everything makes it and I’m forced to choose between going without or slogging through compiling the application from source which is something I can do, but I’m totally uncomfortable with. Using apt-get with the correct repositories is safe, fun and leaves me slightly giddy at the sheer glut of shit I can access for free. Compiling from source, meddling with dependencies and running the risk of breaking something, while a really good feeling when all goes well, more often than not drives me up the wall. Maybe in a few more years I’ll scoff at the challenges of wrangling source tarballs, but until then, I’ll take the repos, please.

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A couple nights ago, on a whim coupled with a deep whiff or two of paint thinner (figuratively), I wiped my trusty and much-loved Ubuntu installation (after properly backing up my shit, of course—what kind of midget-humping idiot do you take me for?) and tried a fresh install of Kubuntu.

I’ve always been a user of the Gnome desktop and while I’ve flirted with others like XFCE, Fluxbox and KDE, I’ve stuck to it, mainly because it worked and I was used to it and rather lazy. Gnome’s been good to me. So, why the switch? Honestly, I’ve no real excuse aside from a constant need to tweak shit, an overwhelming feeling of boredom and a desire to peel myself away from my PlayStation for more than five minutes.

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##Update##
The domain name has transferred and everything seems to be up and running correctly. Please let me know if you encounter errors.
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Please bear with me over the next couple of days as I once again change webhosts. I’m setting the new site up today and the domain transfer should be finished in 48 hours or less. It’s likely that the whole move will be unnoticeable.

My current host, hostinglite.com, is completely unreliable and it’s one of those things where at least once a week, something on their end fucks up. They’re cheap as hell, so I guess I’m getting what I paid for, but I need a site that works and is not consistently down because of SQL problems and nameserver issues, so if I have to pay more, so be it.

This time I am taking the easy route and selecting the host at the top of the recommended list on WordPress.org. If I pay a year up front, it’s only a dollar more than what I pay now for my lame-ass service. BlueHost.com, let’s hope they pull through.

Bringing William Gibson books and the Matrix just a little closer to reality, Sony nailed a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.

That’s right, you geeky fucks. You don’t even need surgery to get the jack implated into your head (you would have done it anyway, daveb sympathizes).

The technique, achieved by shooting ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce “sensory experiences” such as smells, sounds and images has a variety of applications outside of the video game and entertainment industry, not that you really cared.

Since the sensory data is beamed directly into the brain, images could be sent to the blind from cameras they’d wear. What the cameras were streaming would bypass their dead eyes and hit their brain directly, effectively making them no longer blind. The same could apply to deaf people and other such impaired individuals.

Sony researcher Thomas Dawson described it as “The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural timing in the cortex. No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds.”

Is that some cool-ass shit or what? Daveb will be first in line once that shit is mass-produced. It damn well better be during his lifetime, too. He’s a big Matrix Online junkie (sever:”linenoise“, name:”deepnutz“), but fuck that, he wants the real thing!