Random News (Beryl release and video, Edgy Beta)

Here's some interesting recent happenings:MacSlow's got a video of Edgy running Beryl, showing off blurred transparent windows.On that note, the first version of Beryl (0.1.0) was released (yeah, it's still lacking a website). If you've already got the QuinnStorm repositories enabled in Ubuntu, a "sudo apt-get install beryl emerald emerald-themes" should do it for you. (Launch it with beryl-manager.) If you don't have XGL or anything set up yet, I suggest waiting until Ubuntu 6.10 comes out at the end of this month, as it'll be much easier to set up then. Beryl does feel a bit snappier than the old QuinnStorm compiz though and things seem less buggy so far. (The nice thing about Beryl is that Quinn's team can now make their own releases and stabilize them beforehand. No more buggy development...
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Gaim 2.0 Beta 4 coming soon

I just spotted on the Gaim development blog that a fourth beta of Gaim 2.0 is coming soon. The blog has some screenshots of the new features that are worth taking a peek at (global buddy icon integrated into UI, different indentation). Check them out!If you're still running Gaim 1.5, I strongly suggest trying out the new Gaim 2.0, even though it's still in beta. The UI overhaul makes it much easier to use - no more nagging "away" screen.Lastly, Planet Gaim has launched in order to make it easier for avid fans to keep track of Gaim's development. Good stu...
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WINE 1.0 in early 2007?

The latest issue of the WINE Weekly Newsletter was released last week and has some interesting details about where WINE's headed. For those not familiar with WINE, it's a software project that allows Micrsoft Windows applications to run under Linux (and other *NIX OSes). It's been in development for about 13 years now and is the result of a tremendous effort by many people. Over the past few years, WINE's compatibility has been improving at an impressive rate, and I consider it to be at that pivotal point where you can download a random Windows app from the internet and expect it to install and actually run (a far cry from the situation three...
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Dear Lazyweb: Backing up Email in Evolution

Dear Lazyweb,My university generously provides us with a whopping 25 megabytes of email storage, and has been sending me messages on a daily basis that my inbox is 93% full.I use Evolution as my mail client, and it's an IMAP mail server.How can I download my 23 megs of emails and a stick them in a tarball?If anyone has any ideas or hints on this, I'd appreciate it very much if you dropped me a comment. :)Than...
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OSS Usability and Linux: What?

I found an interesting article in the Digg queue today titled, "Windows & OSS: The Usability Problem".After giving it a read, I realized that I just don't agree with most of the author's points. Allow me to unleash the hounds:Lack of standardized user interfaceUsers of open source operating systems are spoilt for choice: Gnome, KDE and Xfce only to name a few desktops and Blackbox, WindowMaker, AfterStep, FluxBox, fvwm and mwm just to name a few of available window managers. Yes, diversity is generally a good thing, but consider how confused an average Windows user must feel when all the programs look and behave differently among different desktops.Well, I've got some ground-breaking news for you: It's been a long time since I've used a distribution of Linux that actually asked me which...
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Goodbye XGL, Goodbye AIGLX (Hello Xorg 7.1?)

Something awesome happened today.NVIDIA released a beta of their new 1.0-9625 drivers. I'll just skip to the good part, as NVIDIA's James Jones explained it: Neither Xgl or AIGLX are required to use compiz with the NVIDIA drivers now that they natively support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap. Xgl is an X server that renders using OpenGL and runs on top of another X server. It was the first X server available to support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap. AIGLX stands for Accelerated Indirect GLX. It is not related to compiz or GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap at all, except that support for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap in the open source DRI OpenGL drivers...
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GNOME 3.0 Mockup: "May-B"

There's an interesting mockup of GNOME 3 over on GNOME-Look.org that someone did:The mockup looks like a combination of Gimmie, (U)SLAB, and Mathusalem (elements which should probably be merged into GNOME sooner or later.) The tags/files panel on the right looks it could use some work (layout, size, fonts, etc.), but the overall concept seems like it's pointed in the right direction.On a related note, the new DesktopThoughts blog (who's author created the mockup) aims at discussing ideas for "the next desktop". If you're interested in seeing what people come up with or you've got some ideas of your own, be sure to give it a visit.Now, we just...
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Edgy CDs, NVIDIA preview, Neuros OSD, Linux 2.6.18

Lots of Linux news happening around the web today:Apparently Canonical's ShipIt isn't going to offer free CDs for Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft...Phoronix.com has a preview of NVIDIA's 1.0-9XXX series drivers, which don't currently have a ETA, but should offer the long saught-after "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap" extension for hardware accelerated XGL/AIGLX.Neuros is offering cheap beta hardware of their new "OSD" device to open source hackers. (Think someone can get that thing to run MythTV?)The new Linux 2.6.18 kernel was released. It's got a ridiculously huge changelog, and features some new SATA stuff, and some other things that I can't seem to find...
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HOWTO: Banshee 0.11 + Ubuntu

Dec 9/06: Banshee 0.11.3 has been released! Updated HOWTO here.Updated Sept 26, 2006 (Added iPod support stuff)Updated October 16, 2006 (Minor fixes)With the Banshee 0.11 hot off the press, and no .DEBs for Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake in sight, I figured people would probably appreciate some instructions on how to install the new Banshee. Well, here we go:IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have the QuinnStorm repositories enabled (for Compiz/XGL stuff), you might encounter this compile error: "/bin/grep: can't read /usr/lib/libXrender.la: No such file or directory" or something along those lines. The necessary fix can be found here. (I just ended up removing...
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Banshee 0.11 Released!

It's been a while since the last Banshee release, but the wait was well worth it. Among the new features in Banshee 0.11 are better tagging support (including writing for all the readable formats), the ability to import a selection or all the music from a digital audio player into Banshee, one-click track rating, an improved preferences dialog, and a new song-change notification bubble (using libnotify, so they should have a somewhat consistent look with the rest of the desktop).A song-change notificationThere's also three new official plugins:Recommendations - This uses the awesome Last.fm service to recommend you different artists based on...
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Compiz gets forked real good: Beryl

It was time. QuinnStorm (who maintained her own tree of compiz and provides awesome Ubuntu packages) has forked off Compiz into a new project, Beryl.It's been clear for a while that QuinnStorm's version of Compiz has diverged from the simplicity present in the first release of Compiz. Quinn's tree has included all sorts of community developed plugins, most of which add shameless bling with little contribution to enhancing usability.That's the difference as I see it: Novell's Compiz will continue to be a stable compromise between bling and usability, and Quinn's Beryl will become the community-driven bling-machine. And that's not to say that Beryl...
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Why I love GNOME (part 1?)

If someone asked me, "What's the most underrated feature in GNOME?", I'd undoubtedly show them this: Did you see that?All I had to do to extract that archive was right-click on it, and hit "Extract here". That's it. I didn't have to open an application and choose where I wanted to extract the archive to or anything. (It's probably the feature I miss the most when I use Windows or OS X...)Oh yeah, and I forgot the coolest part: If the archive you're extracting contains a bunch of files that aren't grouped in a parent folder, it knows to create a new directory to throw them in (so you won't end up with files littered all over your desktop.) Neato.What do you think is the most underrated feature in Linux, GNOME, or whatever desktop environment you u...
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Ubuntu Deja Vu...

Didn't this already happen?Oo...
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Get GNU/Linux and Linux.org

There's an interesting post on Digg that hasn't quite made the front page yet:Is Linux.org hurting Linux?If you've ever visited Linux.org, you'll probably have an opinion on this.My opinion?Absolutely.The majority of the people who've taken the poll on the Ubuntu Forums seem to agree.Is there something better?Absolutely.It's clean, simple, eye-catching, and the information that the community wants to send to potential users is easy to get to. While Get GNU/Linux does have some typos and some GNU-isms (I think the general public might not get the free beer/free speech thing), it's certainly a great start. I think the official Ubuntu site in particular...
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Release: MythTV 0.20

After 7 months of hard work, a new version of MythTV (0.20) has finally been released. This release includes support for a bunch of new pieces of hardware, more DVB stuff, and some other cool stuff like OpenGL accelerated menus.I've been using a copy of MythTV 0.20 from SVN for a couple of weeks, and it seems rock solid so far. My favourite features of the new version have to be the OpenGL menus (which now smoothly fade in/out to one another) and the new "Internal" player. The internal player can be used in MythDVD and MythVideo to play DVDs, DivX/XviD, and MPEG videos. The internal player even features support for DVD menus, which is pretty...
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Formatting your USB stick in Linux

After all that dealing with all that fake USB key stuff, I ended up picking up a 5 gig USB stick from Z-Cyber (it was cheap). Long story short, I ended up having to format it, and I haven't been able to get it properly formatted since. I could get Linux to see the sole FAT32 partition on it, but not Windows. Oddly enough, even if I formatted it with Windows, it still wouldn't show up properly on Windows machines.Anyways, I think I've finally found the proper way to format your USB key in Linux. This extremely helpful article walks you through it.I think I kept making two mistakes before I found that article. The first was that I kept forgetting...
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Updates from the Web: GNOME 2.16, Exaile, and more

I've been pretty busy over the past few days, and I apologize for the lack of updates. In the meantime, here's some interesting articles I've spotted:Ars Technica has a First Look at GNOME 2.16The 2X TerminalServer seems to be getting a bit of press (ie. it popped up on digg, hardly the press though.) It's another open source (but commercial) implementation of the NoMachine server. Honestly, the NoMachine server kicks ass, so I'm not quite sure why you'd want to use this one. (It's a breeze to install in the latest version too - just 3 .DEBs)Red Herring has an interview with Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and Linspire, where he talks about Linux, Linspire, and the music industry. I found this part of the interview particularly interesting - Way to dodge the question Michael:Q: And so...
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Linux Distros Timeline

I spotted a cool timeline over on Digg that shows when each major Linux distribution was created and was branched.It's neat to see how recent Ubuntu really is relative to all the other distros, and to see how many forks/branches there a...
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I think MythTV is trying to tell me something....

I think my MythTV box is trying to tell me somethi...
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