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.

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There’s a pun in here somewhere and I’m making a poor effort at finding it.

Adobe have recently shown off their next RIA killer app at Adobe MAX.  Thermo (you see what I did there?), is an app that actually dues allow a designer to design a wire frame app image in Photoshop and hand it to a developer to convert to a real app in minutes.

I have been in jobs where I have had to mock up a UI in Photoshop and make tweaks and changes to get the initial look right.  But then when it comes to replicating that look in a web app there is a ton of work ahead.  you have no choice but to start from scratch, maybe re-using parts of the Photoshop image you mocked up, but it is a pain in the ass.

Thermo drops the bomb on all that pain (you see what i did there?) allowing a designer to design a wire frame in Photoshop using best practice, then open the resulting PSD in Thermo and have the flex code generated for you.  It’s a simple matter to convert pictures of text boxes into text boxes, pictures of scrollbars into scrollbars, maintaining the EXACT look you had in Photoshop.

Ajaxian have a post that contains one of the first video’s to come out of MAX of the demo.  Watch it it really is cool.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Thermo

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