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I like avant-windows-navigator but I can not use it with compiz-fusion as performance in it’s really bad. The most important problems is rendering in applications like firefox or evince, this sort of task eat my cpu. In this sort of programs responsiveness is one of the key features so i dumped compiz-fusion some time ago and got back to the plain old metacity till I found that a composite manager was being developed inside metacity. It worked good (better than compiz-fusion) but still eats some additional resources.

But the other day i changed my settings again for a nice new project called Cairo Composite Manager. From the project page,

Cairo Composite Manager is a versatile and extensible composite manager which use cairo for rendering. Rendering can be done in 2D or 3D, using Xrender and Glitz backends. Plugins can be used to add some cool effects to your desktop.

So here the instructions on how-to install it,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add this lines,

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gandalfn/ubuntu gutsy main universe

now exceute,

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo apt-get install cairo-compmgr

An icon will appear on Applications > System Tools, so try starting it from there.
Now there are some tweaks that you can do, but you will need to test if they work fine for you (for example glitz backend dosen’t work for me)

Glitz backend (default is xrender),

gconftool-2 --set --type=string /apps/cairo-compmgr/screen_0/general/backend "glitz"

This one is quite unstable so rollback if it dosent work,

gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/cairo-compmgr/screen_0/general/native_pixmap_bind true

Finally if you like it and want to run cairo-compmgr every time you login do,

System > Preferences > Sessions , and Add a new entry,

Name: Cairo Composite Manager
Command: /usr/bin/cairo-compmgr

And now some screenshots from the author,

Enjoy!

I just found that there’s a new PPA available in launchpad, this new PPA is telepathy related. A PPA (Personal Package Archives) as you may already know it’s a service provided by launchpad to developers that simplifies software distribution for ubuntu distros. In the other hand Empathy might be the next IM client in the GNOME desktop, it was proposed for inclusion some time ago, but enoght talking, lets how easy is to install this great program.

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

#telephaty ppa
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu gutsy main

(You can do it from a terminal, wih something like this, sudo nano -w /etc/apt/sources.list)

Now update the repositories,

sudo apt-get update

And finally install Empathy,

sudo apt-get install empathy

And you are done, try out and report bugs!

Obviously the mandatory screenshot here and here

Sometime ago i was playing with powertop and as recomended by it, i ran the following command,

sudo hal-disable-polling --device /dev/scd0 'hal'

Yesterday i was trying to burn a cd and my box was having problems with the detection of the blank cds, and i was suspecting that it was related with this.

sudo hal-disable-polling --enable-polling --device /dev/scd0

The above line fixed the problem! And i was able to burn all my thesis files! (great no more thesis! yahoo!)
I will probably end up filling a bug in launchpad (nautilus ?) cause mounting of normal CD were working, but blank CDs were having problems while mounting.

Yes! guys and gals, our beloved window manager is kicking ass in composite land. There’s a new branch on metacity subversion were developers are working on composite features for metacity. So far we have, transparency, shadow and ALT+tab Godness, and now that I’m running a composite WM i can use the nice MAC OS X like dock bar, AWN. All this without the lag (and CPU masacre) introduced in compiz-fusion when scrolling applications.

If you want to install the development branch you can do it this way, first check out the code form gnome subversion,

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/metacity/branches/iains-blingtastic-bucket-o-bling/ metacity

(you will need subversion package for this, if you don’t have it just, sudo apt-get install subversion)

then change to the metacity dir and for the next steps you will need some libraries so install the following packages,

sudo apt-get install gnome-common build-essential autoconf gnome-devel libtool

(hmm…I’m probably missing something….)

cd metacity

/bin/bash autogen.sh

./configure --enable-compositor

make

Now go and edit the following this key /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager,

gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true

Now you can dotwo things, one just test it

./src/metacity --replace

And the second one is run a make install to install it system wide, but this is totally optional.

If you want to run it at start up, you just need to modify the key on /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager

And i could finish the post here, but you will kill me if i dont show a screenshot :P, so here it’s

UPDATE:  This branch was merged in trunk and it’s now deprecated, you should download the code from there now.

Several people asked me recently (in different situations) about what are the sites that i read/visit on a daily basis (most times hourly :P). So here it goes the list,

• Planet GNOME - This is my favorite one, great hackers post here.
• Unofficial Planet Python - great planet.
• Planet DEBIAN - You can find some good posts here also.
• Planet Ubuntu - My distro plane.
• Universe Gentoo - The “distro i would love to have time to ” planet
• Monologue - Planet of mono developer.
• DIGG - im getting bored of this one, but from time to time you find a great article.
• Slashdot - i dont read it this one as frequent as before, but i enjoy reading the comments.
• LinuxToday - Quite good in selecting linux news.
• Phoronix - Mostly hardware reviews.
• Reddit - better than digg in some aspects but very similar idea.

That’s the list, there are other sites that i visit from time to time like lenovo blogs or planet openbox. Also to the list above you can add my family/friends blog that you can find in my blogroll.

Avant-Window-Navigator(AWN) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen. It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets. This is a really nice application, not only for the eyecandy, but also for productivity. One of the things i love is that all the applications icons are available in all the workspaces, so if you are working on a workspace and click in an application that’s in an other workspace it will take you to that workspace and show the app. That’s really nice and if you add a 3d cube to that it gets even better :DI’m not actually using it as i disabled compiz-fusion cause it was eating up all my cpu when rendering windows while scrolling and eye candy is nice but it dosen’t worth that much. If you are using ubuntu you can install it like this,

Add the following lines to you /etc/apt/source.list

## AWN
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42 gutsy avant-window-navigator
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42 gutsy avant-window-navigator

Signature,

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/reacocard.asc
sudo apt-key add reacocard.asc
rm reacocard.asc
sudo apt-get update


Now update repositories,

sudo apt-get update

And now install AWN,

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-bzr awn-core-applets-bzr

If you want to start awn when ubuntu starts, do the following,

System > Preferences > Sessions

And add a new entry with the command,

avant-window-navigator

Here you can see a video on how it works,

I love this application, it’s a pity that my video card (I have an ATI X1300) sucks so hard….

Matt Kohut (Lenovo Worldwide Competitive Analyst) made a quite controversial blog post asking readers why waste your time using linux on a laptop ? and he realized how far away of the reality he was. So now he is asking which distro should be preinstalled on a thinkpad, so go and vote!

Today GNOME is 10 years old. Thanks to all the great people that make GNOME possible and give us a peace of liberty every release.

Reading this article today, i realized that there’s a project for making a semantic desktop. The project is called NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge, easy to remember huh ? :S) it’s slogan “The Social Semantic Desktop”.So there you have it the perfect mix, you have web 2.0 + Social + open source + desktop = 11.500.000 EUR funding :P. This sort of things have a lot of potential if you know exactly what you are doing and you have a balance of theoric and practical knowledge, use ontologies just because it’s interesting and difficult doesn’t make any sense. As always people at KDE already have an implementation of this (because it’s like making UI_Components++, and that’s what kde developers know to do…. :P) here it’s a video about kde’s approach,

We know that taggin’ things by hand just doesn’t work, people prefer (and i think it’s sane think like that) being outside with friends or family instead of taggin’ photos or files. Because gnome it’s about simplicity, there’s a google soc project that it’s doing face detection for f-spot. So later you could search in beagle a pic of your girlfriend and you in January 07 instead of digging around of 10GB of pics. Probably (with the help of an ontology relation maybe) beagle will also show a conversation of you and your girlfriend (in january 2007), where your girlfriend reminds you that if you ever forget that her birthday on june the 23th he will kill you (typically *sight*). So if you don’t want your gf slapping you stay tuned to what happens in NEPOMUK!

In other news i just updated my wordpress installation and it seems that i lost my blogroll and i think the WYSIWYG editor is broken and remember use gnome or you will loose your girlfriend

Yesterday I made a quick and dirty script to notify me about new mails on a exohelpdesk. But the interesting thing is that i found how to change the theme of the notifications (i really dont like the one with ubuntu). I blanked this gconf key value /apps/notification-daemon/theme and Tadah! I have a nicer look now.

Btw you could use the script to notify you about new mails also!