xabbott.blg

Split Browser, situational but nifty. Let’s you view multiple web pages split up in one window. I personally like using it while writing blog or wiki entries.

I just found out about the site of this artist named David Lanham. He’s got some awesome artwork, wallpapers, icons, etc. Someone ported his Amora theme to GTK+Emerald and it looks awesome. I couldn’t find a port of the Amora icons so I am currently working on that. Obligatory screen shot….

Thanks to this post in the Archlinux forums my fonts look much better! I use an LCD monitor as does the poster in that thread. My fonts weren’t horrible before, but if you used Linux you know fonts can be inconsistent at times.

In any case the packages are all from AUR and are as follows: freetype2-cleartype, cairo-cleartype, and libxft-cleartype. If you’ve never used AUR or modified PKGBUILD files I highly suggest you check out the Arch wiki. You cold use Aurbuild or Yaourt to help make getting AUR packages easier.

You will need to modify the PKGBUILD file for cairo-cleartype. Change the package version from 1.2.4 to 1.2.6, then update or comment out the md5sum line.

I recently downloaded and tried the live distribution Mandriva One 2007, all for one simple reason:Metisse. I like eye candy and saw the videos. Metisse is this very interesting effect filled desktop similar in my opinion to Enlightenment. Looking at the videos the features seemed a lot more useful than Beryl’s.

I hadn’t used Mandriva before although I had used Mandrake 6 about eight years ago. Anyway, tried it in my Toshiba notebook first. The boot screen and wallpaper are an eye burning orange. Once I am actually loaded into the desktop I can not click anything. When clicks would register it’d be for a split second. I then figured I would just navigate with the keyboard. Although I was able to rotate some windows like that, it still wasn’t pleasant. I switched to terminal and played with xorg. I tried several things in my attempt to fix it but to no avail.

I then tried it on an a 6 year old Dell. Similar problems…all my clicks would register a fvwm menu. I wasn’t able to do anything more than I did on the notebook.

Finally I tried it on my main desktop where it did actually function but the poor performance of Mandriva just made the experience underwhelming. It was honestly one of the worst performing live disc I’ve used. I’m not sure how much of this was due to Mandriva and how much was Metisse itself. I’m going to attempt to compile it for my current distro or I’ll try it again if I see another distribution offer it.

The trailer for the long-awaited film about the greatest hero who ever lived.

Over at the Ubuntu forums they’re trying to make a big push for visitors to adopt Jabber. If you don’t know, Jabber is an free and open instant messaging standard. The benefits would be similar to how email operates now. You could use any client, have any address as your username, etc. If you have a Gmail account then you already have a Jabber name. You could use Google Talk or add it to your current IM client. If you don’t have one and would rather not use Google to get one, just go to Jabber.org to find various Jabber servers.

Heard about this on net@nite. It’s called Twitter, almost like a mini blog. You post small snippets about what you are doing at any given time. You can post from your cell phone, instant message client, and from the website itself.

Wallpaper: Codename 47

GTK theme: Murrina PF-Y Blue

Emerald theme: PF-4

Metacity: System G or Murrine Metacity

Icons: PF Icons or Ubuntu Human Azul

While I know a lot of people are happy with XMMS. I find that if you have a large collection of music you want something with a library. I’ve tried a few and found Amarok to be the very best. I mean best across all platforms too. Once KDE/Qt apps start getting ported to Windows it could easily be one of the top five players.

But I use Gnome so I looked for a Gnome/GTK alternative. Rhythmbox box was decent but kind of plain. Banshee would crash and choke for me just trying to create my database (5-6k mp3s). Songbird looks promising but it’s still young and had some bugs. Although I will be keeping an eye on it. Not surprising I ended up with Exaile (v2.8), which is trying to be Amarok using GTK+. It isn’t on par with Amarok yet but I found it to be better than the other GTK players easily. While it’s still in active development it’s been rather stable for me. Here’s a screen cap I took of it back in December.

If you only want a player I highly recommend Audacious. I’m sure I’ve missed some players out there. If you know of one I’d like to hear about it.