I was compelled tonight to actually perform a stunt. Yup fat as I am and wired with Caffeine I actually performed a real bona fide no tricks stunt - without the aid of a net. Ladies and gents I jumped on board a fast moving band wagon.

Yup, I s*** you not this sucker was moving and moving damn fast, i think I got a splinter…

I paid a full £10-ish for AudioSurf, a game that has been gathering erm… steam on the er… STEAM network. — see what I did there ;0) — The game allows you to ’surf’ your music collection collecting different coloured blocks strewn all over a virtual track. The track and blocks are actually generated based on the song you choose. In the latest version you get the game, the full soundtrack from Valve’s Orange Box and a new feature that allows you to surf songs from net radio.

One superb feature is that you can discover entirely new songs from featured artists. Tonight I discovered ‘Lost on Purpose‘, a one man indie band. This guy has an acoustic feel to his songs with a real upbeat rythm. his site and ordering process for his songs could do with a bit more polish, evidently he’s a better musician than web developer, but then I’m no musician (unless out of practice drummer counts) so I’m not going to hang him out to dry for that.
Anyhow, his stuff is great and he’s available on iTunes so you can find him and buy him real easy. I think you can play samples from his site too if you want to get a feel for the music.

So, Two recomendations for you: Buy AudioSurf and go check out a one man indie band… you don’t have to do both btw but do one and do it now ;0)

Lost on Purpose - the 70’s:

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)

The latest version of Ubuntu is now available for download. Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is said to be a cutting edge release incorporating a lot of updated applications and using the latest version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 is set to allow pretty good performance if you are browsing the web.

I’ve had the beta on my laptop for a couple of weeks and I think this is a good release. FF3 is nice and fast, opening almost instantly and as usual this release includes Ubuntu’s easy to use Package manager, updated to include many of the latest versions of the apps we all know and love.

After a clean install it was a breeze to get compiz fusion running. Simply open the appearance applet via System > Preferences > Appearance. Select the visual Effects tab and then select the Extra radio button. Ubuntu will then download and install the drivers you need. You’ll need to reboot and then go into the Appearance applet again and select the same radio button once more to enable. A bit tedious that last bit but a damn site easier than fiddling around with hardware managers and installing a load of apps.

You’ll want to install the compiz fusion settings manager using the Synaptic package manager (System > Administration > synaptic package manager) then you can use advanced desktop effects settings from the preferences menu to fine tune your desktop.

Codec installation is a breeze too. As soon as a media app tries to play something you don’t have a codec for, you get a prompt asking if you want to go find the right codec. A couple of clicks later (having read the relevant dialogs) you’ll be up and running able to watch anything you like.

No matter which distro I play with I always like coming back to Ubuntu, it just seems to work and it’s so easy to install new apps and keep up to date, if you mostly browse the web, IM your friends and send email, save yourself a ton of cash and ditch windows for Ubuntu (other Linux distro’s are available).

I recently managed to break my Ubunto installation, totally my fault for trying to get KDE running beside my Gnome setup.  Since I couldn’t back out all the stuff I did properly I decided a clean install was my best option, with Linux this is nowhere near as painful as with Windows especially if you have a separate /home partition :0)

So I installed and tried out a couple of different distro’s from the gaggle of new releases that have been pushed out to the community in the past month or so.  There are some very nice distro’s out there and I think this is going to be very good news for the Linux community as we are defenitely going to see some new people coming over to the Linux world and this in turn will spur more innovation and enhancement in the future distributions.

I have settled on Linux Mint KDE community edition after my week of trials, this is mainly due to my familiarity with Ubuntu’s excellent package management and simplicity of getting all the 3D goodness going ;0)

There’s a few things you need to do in order to get this version of Mint running the 3D stuff.

• Install the Restricted driver manager - in Konsole type sudo apt-get install restricted-manager
• When complete run it from the console by typing restricted-manager and then when the manager appears, install the relevant drivers.
• Reboot if you installed the video Drivers
• after this you will need the xserver-xgl component sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl
• Another reboot
• after logging in I used alt-F2 to get the run dialog up and ran compiz –replace
• You may need to tweak the settings in Settings>Advanced Desktop Effects Settings off the system menu to get all the compiz goodness you need.

These instructions worked for me, your mileage may vary of course, if you find you need to do anything different please post your Spec and details of what you had to do as a comment to help others.

Technorati Tags: Mint KDE CE

I’ve just been to the Ubuntu homepage and it’s official Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon is out and ready for download.

The guys at Canonical have done a fantastic job with this release and have included a new core, Gnome 2.20, Compiz-Fusion desktop effects pre loaded, Desktop search and a lot more besides.

Get yourself over to the Ubuntu Homepage for more details Gibbon on the loose… and the links to download.

I mentioned this briefly in my post yesterday but since today is release day for Gutsy I figured it would serve the community well If I make a specific post for it.

Gutsy comes with Compiz-Fusion (CF) enabled by default, this allows you to have some pretty nice effects on your desktop - putting Vista to shame in my book as you don’t need to break the bank to upgrade your vid card in most cases.

I run full bling on my HP DV5157eu Laptop that has a ATI Radeon Mobility 200M video chip in it - not the best by a long shot but able to handle everything Compiz-Fusion (CF) throws at it.

Anyhow down to business.

I have verified CF on Gutsy in two different scenarios:

Upgrade from Feisty where CF was already running
In this scenario it looked at first as if things had gone wrong but they had not.  CF installed fine but needed a couple of adjustments.
First open synaptic package manager and search for compiz.  Scroll through the results until you find the compiz config settings manager and remove it.

Now you have done that you need to repeat the process but this time install it.
I know this sounds stupid but trust me it is necessary, the re-installed version integrates with the new Gnome Appearance manager the old one wouldn’t load at all for me.

Now all that is left for you to do is change all the settings back to where you had them before as they have all been set to defaults (this is why you may have thought things had gone wrong.

Scenario 2 is:

Clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy
In this scenario things may need a bit more tweaking.  After the install completed and the system rebooted the restricted drivers will not be enabled, as these are not Open Source there is good reason not to enable these as you may not actually want them.  For my card, these drivers are necessary Your Mileage may vary on this point.

I enabled the restricted driver for ATI and rebooted.

Initial test of Compiz Fusion raised an error and I traced this down to missing xgl. To correct this I ran $ sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl in a terminal session.  Then Log out and back in but be sure to select the plain Gnome session.
Next Open the appearances dialog and select the visual effects tab, from here select the custom option that should now be there.  After that go ahead and click the preferences button and the compiz config settings manager should load and you can bling up to your hearts content.

hopefully this info will be useful.

Technorati Tags: Compiz-Fusion, Ubuntu Gutsy Compiz

This week I went through a process of upgrading to Gutsy, the new release of Ubuntu that is due for final release tomorrow.  I was previously running on feisty so I used the update manager to update my installation.  I believe from tomorrow Feisty users will see a new update button on the update manager dialog that wil enable them to upgrade.  I updated to the beta version, I’m deliberately not going to say how I did it here because we are so close to release.

Suffice to say that the update went really smooth.

All I needed to do after the update completed (a process taking about 1.5 hours-ish).  was re-install nero, VMWare Workstation and the compiz-fusion settings manager.

All my 3D bling worked a treat, though it was all set to defaults so i had to go into the ‘Advanced Desktop Effects Settings’ manager which looks unsurprisingly exactly the same as the compiz-fusion config settings manager.  everything else just worked for me.

I did decide, however, to do a completely clean install using the Release Candidate CD after I managed to fudge up my networking.
I had planned a fresh install anyhow when gutsy came out, mainly because I had converted my laptop to a completely Linux based machine and not bothered to re-jig the partitions.

Install off the RC CD was smooth as expected, partition management was the same as under feisty.

Once completed, I didn’t have any 3D bling though despite it being turned on by default.  I traced this down simply to the restricted driver not being turned on for my ATI card.  I enabled the restricted driver and re-booted, then all I needed was to install the xgl server using: $ sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl log out then back in ensuring you log into the standard Gnome session, then you can go into the appearance settings, turn on cus bestom appearance and adjust the settings to suit you.

Both the upgrade and the clean install processes worked really well for me and i have to say the Ubuntu crew over at canonical have done an awesome job.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Microsoft have announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 today.  There’s also an announcement regarding Silverlight for Linux.  Known as Moonlight, this is a port of Silverlight to the Linux platform via a partnership with Novel and from the same stable as the Mono development project that brings .Net development to the Linux platform.

Head over to Scott Guthrie’s blog for more details.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight, Mono, Moonlight

Powered by ScribeFire.

There’s been a few links around to help get compiz fusion running on ubuntu, this one gets you to the simplest set of instructions I’ve seen so far.

These worked a treat for me.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Continuing with my trip into the world of Linux, I decided yesterday that I would check out a different distribution to the two i’ve already experienced.  So Far I have tried out Ubuntu Feisty and Fedora 7 and have been impressed with them both.  I’ve managed to get them installed pain free and have had a pretty good experience with them both.

This time I’ve chosen to push myself a bit and have gone with Sabayon Linux.  the version I chose to go with is 3.4e which is an alpha version of the next release.  I fully expected to have a few issues with it being an alpha but bit the bullet none the less.

My initial impression after loading the live CD (a version that runs off the CD for you to try before installing proper), was one of sheer amazement.  As you know I have an HP Pavilion DV5000 series Laptop with an ATI Radeon Xpress 200m Graphics card installed.  Experienced Linux users who are into their gui bling will also know of the pain many people have trying to get CompizFusion running in their distro.  I hope you’ll be as surprised, impressed and in awe of the Sabayon folks as i was when I tell you that Compiz fusion ran off the Live CD!  Full 3D spinning cube bling off the CD!

Well I was impressed and couldn’t wait to get going so I hit the install Icon and off I went.  The usual helpful install app awaits you giving you a simple step by step install process.

You get a choice of either GNOME or KDE for your desktop and this is where I saw my first bug.  I chose GNOME at first as I’d used that before but the very next screen seemed to show that KDE was going to be installed.  There’s also a bug on the partition manager screen that you’ll want to take great care with.  After setting up your partitions and marking which ones you want to format go through the list carefully before you continue.  The theme used is a bit funky and there are black ticks in the format column by each partition that’s going to be formatted.  This is OK except that the background is also black :0)
To be safe, just key through the list using the arrow keys, you can see the columns clearly as each is highlighted.

Once installed you get a decent theme and the desktop runs great.  3D bling didn’t appear for me though and I couldn’t find a way to get it running so I re-installed with KDE.  I figure I might as well try the other desktop type too.
The KDE desktop had full bling from the off for me.  No need to change any settings at all, it just worked.  Also amazingly, my wireless card worked too, just typed in my network password and bingo it was all running.

There’s a huge array of apps installed by default and you get a choice of some cool games too if you are into that sort of thing.  I’m still getting used to KDE and finding my way round Sabayon but so far I am most impressed indeed.

Powered by ScribeFire.