Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Ubuntu + ATI + Beryl = One Nice Desktop

Published
by
icarus
on November 16, 2006
in Linux
. 0 Comments

I recently decided to try running Beryl (an offshoot of AiGLX which is an offshoot of XGL) and found 2 good guides thanks to some quick searches on the Ubuntu forums.
The Radeon Driver howto is excellent and works very well with the older Radeon 9000m card in my laptop. This got the Direct Rendering working using the open source ATI drivers.

The Edgy AiGLX - Beryl guide finished it up nicely leaving me with a simple desktop with lots of funky effect to serve no purpose other then to look good. ;)
I would not suggest running OpenGL games while running AiGLX since there is still major performance problems as the AiGLX uses up most of the Direct Rendering leaving little left for games. So if you are not running any games it’s a great desktop and if you do decide to fire up Quake4, UT2003 or Postal 2 be sure to log off and log on with another session that doesn’t use the AiGLX

Sun Makes Java GPLv2

Published
by
icarus
on November 13, 2006
in Linux and News
. 0 Comments

This morning Sun made a suprise move and announced that their well gaurded and loved Java source code will be fully available by March 2007. They are releasing it under the GPLv2 license which makes it on par with the Linux Kernel.

The discussions on this are already speculating what this means, is it the death throw of a dieing company, are they desperate to fight for the ground that Microsoft  has been fighting against them? I cansee this being a great move as now many Linux distributions can include it on the install media without making you jump through hoops worrying about licensing.

I’ll update with discussion links as I find them, but Slashdot is a good place as any to start with :)

Slashdot.org