Matt Van Stone

Just a quick note to say I just installed Compiz Fusion as per the instructions I posted about earlier. The instructions dont tell you that you have to install the main plugins and extra plugins packages if you want all the cool effects that they showcase in that video. I was pretty disappointed until I figured that out.

I really like the expo plugin. That is the one that shows you all 4 sides of the cube and you can move windows between all of them. To be honest I have never really been able to utilize more than one desktop, so thats something I want to work on.

I must say though, I am dissapointed with the performance. The video makes it look soo smooth. It’s not quite as nice on mine. A lot of the animations are jerky and creating windows is a little slow. I do run a 7800 GT 256MB video card, so I dont see why this is so bad. I tried a few tweaks on the Compiz forums but I didnt see too much improvement. Although, I didnt spend much time on it.

One thing I was impressed with was how easy it was to get up and running. The first time I installed Compiz over a year ago it took me several hours to get working and I believe it was probably more than one session worth of research before I finally got it working. This time it was less than 20 minutes and I had it installed and working. That just goes to show the type of advancements that are being made in Linux.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu don’t come with MP3 support right out of the box because they are not opensource. You have to install these restricted packages on your own.

Amarok has a nifty feature where you can right click on an album and choose Burn This Album. It will give you the option to burn it as an audio CD or a data CD and then will launch K3b to burn it.

However, if you dont have the right packages installed K3b wont be able to convert the MP3s to PCM so that it can burn them directly as audio.

Type the following command in the console window to install MP3 conversion support:
sudo apt-get install libk3b2-mp3 libmad0

libmad0 might be installed already. It was for me, but it is required so I added it to the above command. After this try burning the CD again. Worked for me, hope it does for you too.

Compiz has been around for a long time. There was a forked version called Beryl that I used for a long time that was very popular. The two projects have merged again and this is what they have produced:

For those of you who don’t know, Compiz Fusion is a composition window manager for Linux. It will run on basically any GUI (Gnome, KDE, etc). The purpose of Compiz Fusion is to make the graphical user interface more fun to use at the same time as making it more productive.

This project is still in an alpha stage, which means it is not stable or ready for the general public. You can still download and install it on your Linux though, just don’t complain if you have stability issues. Hopefully they can work on getting this to a stable state now. I’d really like to see that.

• OpenCompositing
• Installing Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu/Kubuntu

I have officially morphed into a level 60 geek. I know I had to compile Linux kernels in college, but this is the first time I have done it for my own enjoyment.

The linux kernel has the potential to include a lot of support for hardware without the need for “drivers” or kernel modules. There are a lot of things that are compiled in by default that the average user may not use anymore. There is a lot of support for hardware that is included to make Linux run on a vast range of systems. So if you compile your own kernel and leave out all that stuff that you don’t use or need you could get a quicker kernel. Also, you can force modules to be compiled into the kernel that you know you always use. Having them precompiled in the kernel can make for a faster boot time.

I used the instructions in the Master Kernel Thread at the Ubuntu forums. I’m not going to reiterate those instructions here because they are constantly updating them. The post is over 6 months old, but the instructions were updated just 4 days ago.

I was able to upgrade my kernel from 2.6.20.16 to 2.6.21.5. I don’t know what the benefit of this newer kernel is really, but it’s newer. I optimized the kernel for my Athlon64 processor and removed support for other processors that this build will never run on. I also ran through these kernel performance tweaks from Own3d in another Ubuntu forums thread.

Following Own3d’s instructions I removed a whole crapload of stuff that I dont use like PPP, SLIP, touchscreen support, ISDN subsystem, video capture support, extra languages, Amateur radio, IrDA, and Bluetooth support. Removing all these things might not be for you, but I don’t use them.

For most modules you have 3 options, to not compile it, to compile it, or to compile it as a module. I didnt think to look the things that were being complied as modules to see if they could be hard-compiled right into the kernel. So it looks like I might be compiling it once more.

Depending on the speed of your computer it can take more than an hour to compile the kernel. On mine it was between 30 minutes and an hour.

One last thing, if you have an Nvidia video card you will have to reinstall the driver after you boot into your new kernel. When you boot you will end up with a black screen. Switch to tty2 by hitting CTRL+ALT+F2 and run the Nvidia installer from there. Also, you will want to read this thread on a bug that exists with the Nvidia driver at the 2.6.21 kernel. Basically when you compile your kernel you want to turn off Paravirtualization Support. If you don’t turn it off you will have problems compiling the Nvidia driver on the new kernel.

Well, 2 nights ago I whacked my SUSE 10.2 install and tried installing OS x86 10.4.8. It looked like it was working, but stalled when trying to extract the files. I was able to format my SATA drive and everything. Since I do have an AMD CPU and an Nforce4 chipset it looks like there might be some problems getting it to install on a SATA drive out of the box. I’m downloading a different ISO to give it a try, but in the meantime I had to get something up and running. So last night I installed Kubuntu 7.10. I have had it downloaded since it was released but I didn’t want to take the time to install it.

First off I had the same two problems I always have with Linux. I had to install the nvidia-glx drivers and I had to remove the bluez packages so that my keyboard and mouse would work without having to reconnect the dongle every time I start up. This only took me about 10 minutes to do as opposed to the first time when it took me hours of research to figure out. Oh yeah, and usplash still doesnt work. By adding a better resolution to /etc/usplash.conf I was able to get the shutdown splash to display, but the boot splash is all distorted.

I must say, I am happy with how responsive it is. It does seem a little quicker than SUSE was. However, there is a lot of software that SUSE came with preinstalled that Kubuntu doesn’t. Firefox for example. It also seems to boot faster. From GRUB to KDM it’s about 24 seconds on my AMD 3700+. I was able to add my windows shares on my fileserver to the fstab file and they mount automatically when I boot. On SUSE I had to do sudo mount -a every time I booted up to get the shares to mount. That was a pain in the ass because if I started Amarok before running the mount command Amarok wouldnt be able to find my music on the server and would delete it all from the database. I would have to reindex my entire music folder again.

There is this issue with kdesu where sometimes it can’t find the current screen session for starting elevated applications. There is a bug report on this but it wasn’t fixed before Feisty was released. In that bug report kko has posted a fix that worked for me. It’s more of a workaround though because you have to do it every time it gets messed up.

I also had to install rdesktop for krdp to work. It’s strange that they had krdp installed, but not the required rdesktop package. Of course I also had to install MP3 support and all that jazz.

Those are the only things I can think of now that I had issues with. I think I am going to hold off on installing Beryl, or whatever it’s called now. I like how stable this stock install has been. Eventually I’d like to have a tri-boot system OS X, XP, and some KDE based linux, but I need to get an IDE drive that I can try OS X on before I attempt that.