Christams 2004
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
Looks like some RMS wannabe claiming to be a kernel developer has ‘ordered’ Kororaa to stop production because it includes the nVidia and ATI drivers on the LiveCD. The post and thread on this is mostly full of people saying the email is a farce and to continue with the project, after all it’s freely available and nobody is making any profit from of this.
I agree with a lot of the posts but the project should continue with some caution, add a few disclaimers about “Non-GPL drivers being used” since this seems to be more or a moral then a legal issue, to me. Chris has not received any offcial C&D notice (aka a letter from a lawyer), if he does then yes he must stop. But until then he has no reason to stop development on a free product.
Removing the drivers from the project are not possible because of the dependency XGL has on accellerate OpenGL, the open source drivers (nv and ati or radeon) do not supply the accellerated support for the environment. Without these drivers there is no project, unless he adds support to compile the drivers on boot which will extend the boot time by about a minute. I can see this as an option if a cease and desist letter is received, even then there is a good possiblilty that once a judge gets the case he’ll throw it out since it’s entirely a moral issue and nobody is losing/gaining profit from this project.
I maybe entirely wrong but I don’t think there is a case here other then someone disagreeing with how something is used, which would be a civil case at best. To quote Dennis Miller “Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.”
This is coming along nicely, added a ton of sidebar plugins which are quite fun. Also working on my own plugin, lets see if I can finish it or just give up and forget about it 
I made the original theme more dynamic, flexible and sidebar widgetable. I don’t get the hard code page sizes…I’m sure it’s to keep the design from going arry but a couple extra lines like min-width in the CSS can be used to keep the style from breaking when making the window to small, there is also max-width to do the same the other way. But what do I know, I’m just an amature hobbiest web designer that can’t come up with an original theme on his own anyway.
The top left logo doesn’t display properly in Internet Explorer 5.5 & 6 because of it’s (lack of) PNG support. I haven’t checked with the IE7 beta, which I think they fixed it in, but I suggest Firefox which does display PNG correctly and also CSS (so this page will look even better then it does in IE!).
I moved the blog software from B2 to WordPress yesterday and have spent some time tweaking and modifying a theme to my likeing. More dark and brooding, still needs a lot of work but that is for another day.
Should be getting our new mp3 players soon, might have to do a review here on it. In the mean time I’ll see what else I can do to this and am open to suggestions
I’ve been slowly working on moving my Linux desktop to the Xgl/Compiz combination and have been impressed and disappointed with the results. With how young this project is it is expected as the bug reports fill up and slowly get knocked out. Xgl Was developed by Novell a few years back and have released several demo videos showing the oohs and awws off, but the project wascompletely internal until August 2005 when they open sourced it. It wasn’t until January 2006 that people were able to display results. Since then the project has been moving at a very rapid pace and is now included in the latest Xorg release (7.0.1)
Compiz was developed as an OpenGL Window Manager. This is the part that all the tricks take place in. Wobbly windows, cube effect for multiple desktops, a very snappy alt+tab window switcher, transset gives true alpha transparency and a very nice zoom feature to mention a few.
I’ve been using CoffeeBuzz’s xgl-coffee overlay for portage in Gentoo and recently switched to the compiz-quinnstorm which contains the more experimental plugins like trailfocus (my favorite).
I’m currently trying to set it up on my laptop wiht an ATI Radeon (desktop uses an nVidia) but running into a few snags with unrelated packages needed to build Gnome. My desktop runs great except for a few problems, mostly with games. Puzzle Pirates runs great, but the cursor doesn’t update often enough which is more then a little disorientating . Fullscreen games currently require you to run some tricks, like using xinit -e GameExecutable -- :1 to start the game on a new X session or use xgame. I haven’t gotten to point of trying these yet.
I’m hopeing in the future Xgl/Compiz will be much more stable and popular, the possibilities will surely give OSX some good competition 
the Gentoo HOWTO XGL page is constantly updated to accomidate for any new changes and should be checked often if anything goes wrong with your current install after an update
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