So, once again out of a general boredom and desire to up my geekness to the bleeding new shit, I installed Kubuntu Edgy-Eft knot 2. Not even an alpha release. I feel risky, what can I say…I wore a condom.

Of course, my initial upgrade via source list completely fucked my system leaving me unable to boot any kernel. I seem to always have that luck whenever trying to finagle a dist-upgrade. Luckily, I’ve a habit of backing my shit up before doing risky shit like this, so I was cool. I downloaded an ISO and burned a CD on my laptop, wiped my desktop’s Linux partition and reinstalled. The disk install worked fine, booting like a live cd and giving me a little icon to click on the desktop to do an actual disk install. The new installer is fancier than ever and I was up and running in a couple glasses of wine and a nervous cigarette or two.

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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.