I’ve been struggling this week with a decision to revert my laptop back to Windows XP pro from Ubuntu. Not because I have gone off Ubuntu (or Linux in general) far from it! Unfortunately I have a need for a mobile platform that I can use to help me learn Adobe CS3 and to work with my new camera. The software that came with my new camera (an EOS 40D) won’t work properly on 64 bit XP and has exhibited problems in a virtual environment.
Sure I could dual boot my home PC but then my camera is tied to my home office if I want to utilise the remote shooting ability that the software gives me.
Plus, I want to learn Adobe CS3 in a more deliberate manner than I have employed up to now, and trying to get it working under WINE is a pain.
I have finally managed to get my laptop re-installed and running with all the apps I need, a process that has taken much much longer than installing a linux distro, especially because I don’t have a home partition that holds all my settings.
One thing I really missed was the Compiz desktop. I’m surprised at how much I have changed the way I work because of the flexibility offered by multiple desktops. A quick search for ‘virtual XP desktops’ in Google popped up some results and there were some free tools out there, not to mention the Microsoft power toy, but the usefulness and wow factor is just not there really. So Last night I made a more determined effort to dig something out, another Google search or two later and I stumbled upon CubeDesktop This app is damned awesome! for a windows app. Unfortunately it’s not open source or free so that’s a bit of a pain, but it is reasonably priced and very feature rich.
I’m running it on a laptop with an AMD Turion 64 bit processor running in 32 bit mode with Win XP Pro and I only have an ATI Radeon 200M graphics card on this rig so nothing special at all.
The cube looks sweet though, it’s pretty smooth and I have not dialled things down much at all, theres some great transparency effects and you are not restricted to just a cube either, you can have a carousel, flip between desktops and have a flat desktop browser too.
The latest version let’s you have 6 desktops (I can’t see a way to change this at all) each can have their own Icons and wallpapers if you choose, and you can only see what’s on each desktop by hovering over the icon in the task tray or flipping between the desktops but it’s far far better than anything else I have seen for windows.
Definitely recommended if you want to get even close to Compiz Fusion but don’t expect to have everything available in Compiz, not without buying most of the object desktop suite as well.
I miss Linux but I have a reasonable XP system up now and I have my reasons for it. ;0)
