Geek with an attitude

I usually don't blog about other articles (usually I just talk about me, myself and I), but after reading about an art school that completely wiped off their MacOSX along with other propietary software infavor of Ubuntu and free & opensource software, I got a warm & fuzzy feeling that drove me to blog this. Check it out and see if you feel good about this article: http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/09/2238246&from=rss There are also links to some interesting software such as an alternative to flash, moho (cartoon animation) and DVD mastering. Enjoy.

The unthinkable happened today -- My hard drive crashed! The machine stopped booting with scary looking messages I don't recall ever seeing. I looked desperately, among the randomness for a message of relief - Kernel panicked, but not even that message was to be found. It all started soo innocently. I updated my Xgl portage tree - just like any other morning, and went about compiling the update packages. Now my machine is known to be quite buggy and reboot, especially during disk or processor intensive tasks. Overtime I've learned to live with it, blaming it on bad hardware (after all Linux is stable right!). But the random reboots were only a mere annoyance, thanks to reiser-fs the journaled filesystem, I never met with any sort of corruption -- that is until today. The gruelling path to recovery I booted off a taprobane Livecd , and went about fscking the root partition. The exact command was: reiserfsck /dev/hda3 After checking for over an hour, it came up with a long repor...

While the title of this post isn't affiliated with Yahoo Inc., that was my reaction soon after I re-emerge Xgl and compiz with the paint_patch enabled. Now it works perfectly.. well except for the F12 compose like effect. No more black patches on the screen. Gentoo does really rock! when you need to be on the bleeding edge as after I switched to the latest unofficial portage overlay called xgl-coffee, I got the transparent patch that allows me to easily make any focused window transparent, simply using Alt+mouse wheel as well as an all important kdelibs patch that allows applications to be minimized to the system tray. As you can see in the screenshot, I'm running Xgl on kde (using gnome-window-decorator for now since kde-wondow-decorator is not ready) with full transparency and other nice effects. Here is the custom script I use to load kde. #!/bin/bash echo ">Starting XGL at Display: $1" echo "========= XGL ============" # If nvidia or any other #Xgl :...