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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.

This is a tiny little plugin for xchat2, so every time someone says your name it will pop-up a notify.

You should copy the plugin to ~/.xchat2 if you want to load the plugin automatically at startup. Or you can use,

/py load filename
If you want to load a plugin

/py unload filename|modulename
If you want to unload a plugin

/py list
If you want to list loaded plugins

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!

Here it’s a tip on how to speed up your system a bit and get ride of metacity, without loosing all the benefits of the gnome-platform.

• Install a window manager, in my case Openbox, sudo aptitude install openbox obconf
• Open your Configuration Editor, go to Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor
• Go to / -> desktop -> gnome -> applications -> window_manager
• Change Default value, for example to /usr/bin/openbox
• Now restart (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)

You could have also changed the gconf key at ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/%gconf.xml

UPDATE: Version of openbox in ubuntu 7.04 is too old and slow, grab last version from here

If you miss Firefox 1.5 days, here you have 3 little hacks that will make your day,

Open a new tab with this url, about:config

• Backspace button as Previous Page: browser.backspace_action change value to 0
• No tab scrolling: browser.tabs.tabMinWidth change value to 0
• One close button for all the tabs: browser.tabs.closeButtons change value to 3

There’s a missing column in nagios monitoring system. Most of the times the reason of monitoring something is to get notified of an event and to take a proper action. It would be nice to have a column dedicated to the actions you can take in a given situation. So having that in mind i hacked the nagios status.cgi, in order to achieve this:

I installed nagios 1.4.1 from source, to make your service page to look like the above you need to,

1. Go to the source directory, open the cgi/status.c file and apply this patch.
2. Compile. Run: make cgis
3. Copy the compiled file to nagios installation, i.e.: cp /usr/local/src/nagios-1.4/cgi/status.cgi /usr/local/nagios/sbin
4. Make your own service.php file that fits your needs ( here you have an example ) and put it in /usr/local/nagios/share

Remember to check file permissions.