Mmm…eye candy…

“Ooh, sparkly!”
-Homer J. Simpson

Tonight, I installed Compiz and XGL and all I can say is, “holy frakk!” In short, its the future of the graphical Linux desktop as it provides a graphical display that matches OS X’s Aqua and Vista’s upcoming Aero Glass. The XGL code was released by Novell in January and the Compiz code last week. As I’ve seen it so far, the collective responce of the Linux community has been “ohmigoshwow!” and it’s been an early, geeky Valentine’s day for early-adopters here, if anything.

Screenshots absolutely do not give justice to XGL and Compiz in action. Go view the video here and be amazing and astounded. I’ve tried many of the things shown in the video - multiple film clips running at once, “live” views while tabbing, the “cubical” virtual desktops, zooming and so on. I took some screenshots and a few videos myself, but I won’t bother posting screenshots, because as I said, it doesn’t do it justice.

One feature I will mention in paticular that I will mention and that I love is the Aqua-esque overview of all your Windows when you hit F12. Its acutally identical the Aqua feature. Click on a window, the mess of windows goes back to whast it was, except with the selected window having focus. If you’ve ever only used Windows you’re probably wondering what in god’s name I’m talking about, but poo to you. Go watch the video. Anyways. I mentioned it as its probably the one redeeming feature in Aqua’s abortion of a UI. New techology means being freed from old restrictions and being able to innovate, but still… Combine it with hot corners - you just send your mouse pointer to a given corner of the screen and either click, hit a given key or just let the pointer hover to trigger an action - and you have amazingly efficient window management. There is a reason why OS X doesn’t support virtual desktops natively. It doesn’t need them, in truth.

I see Suse (being part of Novell and all…) documentation and I see that the Ubuntu and Gentoo communities have jumped on the bandwagon wholesale. There’s been a huge interest in running Compiz among their communities, if probably for no greater reason that mine, which was to drool at all the pretty new eye candy. One cool thing I’ve seen has been Gnome and KDE devs active on both boards (although it stands to reason they would be there already, what with the popularity of each distro) offering advice and no doubt taking feedback. As Eric S. Raymond said, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Installation was suprisingly painless, if lengthy. Xgl requires modular xorg. Installation of xorg 7.0 was as simple as copying and pasting text between two files and issuing about five commands or so. You can’t beat Portage for excellent package management, especially for experimental software, which can otherwise result in dependency hell. Installation of xorg 7.0 took around two hours, which was suprisingly fast considering it involved compiling 163 packages.

After all that was done, I did some tweaking to ensure the new xorg would run fine and then I installed Hanno’s Portage overlay and emerged them. Check the HOWTO page for more details on tweaking after that. I opted to just run Gnome with Compiz as the window manage and as I’ve said above, I was very impressed with how it worked.

February 15, 2006 | Filed Under random | Leave a Comment

Ugh.

Its that day. February 14th. Valentine’s day.

For women across the Western world, it’s a day of boxes of chocolates, roses, hugs, kisses, dinner and a night of sensual love afterward. For men its steak and BJ day, which is also every third Saturday, conincidently. Who is the real winner here?

And for me, February 14th is a day of reflection as due to my upbringing and personality, I’ve made a very concious choiceto have no friends in the flesh and hey, I’m perfectly happy with it most of the time. I live my own full life as I wish it and I really don’t get the whole stigmata behind being a social extrovert, or a loner, to all you non-PC types. Really. I’m not fucking Gollum, I don’t go sneaking around at night from a basement, stealing women’s underwar from washing lines and bringnig them home to sniff them and mutter about “precious…” under my breath. Most of the time. I kid. Somewhat.

I digress. So on this day, I see the lovers strolling hand in hand through the bright spring daylight…and by that I mean “huddling together in the drizzling rain,” and it puts me into a reflective mood: What would my life be like if I hadn’t made the choices I have? Oh, most of the time I have the internet to turn to. I have true friends out there whom I’ve never met in the flesh and probably won’t either. I participate in many communities, big and small, mainstream and exotic. Irish groups, Linux groups, gaming groups, photographic groups, Irish Linux gamers who enjoy photography groups. And so on! Cory Doctorow has written brilliantly about online communities in Eastern Standard Tribe an excellent and freely available work. Download it and read it if you are a self-respecting geek. The catch with an online life is that anyone with whom I might swap Valentine’s wishes with would live several timezones away.

And still I digress! I look at the happy couples hand-in-hand and look back at my own life and wonder how things would be if I hadn’t pushed away everyone who had been close to me outside of - and inside - my family. For all that I am a geek with a select range of interests, there had been women I had been close to and involved with to some degree. I wonder what would have come of things if I had called Helen back that one night or wrote to Cathie like I promised, and so on…

It doubly poignant for me as on this day last year I was off to Paris for a few days with a friend. The trip was very intentionally non-romantic and that it stayed, to our mutual satisfaction. But since then things between us have turned to a deep and mutual loathing over, which is something we equally holdblame for. What if we had just made that bit more of an effort to understand each other? Ah well, what is the past is ultimately the past. If I go digging too deep, reflection will turn into regret, which is always the great and evil posion at the edge of my life.

And to everyone with a Valentine there to share this day and night with you: You bastard. You lucky, lucky bastard.