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ProfessorTomoe posted some nice Arch wallpapers in the forums a few days ago.

I’m trying out with Mac4Lin, a very complete theme that attempts to mimic OS X. It includes themes, skins, and icons for compiz, metacity, pidgin, audacious, etc. While it isn’t original art the package is very impressive and I appreciate the effort.

The documentation seems to be a bit dated but it is easy enough to install if you are already into themes.

While not necessarily a part of Mac4Lin, I decided to try out Mac menu bar Gnome panel applet. I was very surprised how well it work. I was disappointed that XUL apps don’t work with it. Basically all non GTK2 applications will not work with it.

I highly doubt I will stick to this setup but I do wish there were more Linux themes that were this complete. Unfortunately the ones that are tend to mimic OS X or Vista.

B-Con posted a thread on the Arch Linux forums asking which Arch packages users rebuild. Firefox comes up a few times because users rebuild it for official branding. Allan then posted a link to a nifty script to automatically rebuild Firefox with official branding. I’ll post it here as well and hope that WordPress won’t mess it up.
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PJ on the Arch Linux Forums posted a cool Pacman Wallpaper:

Updated 02/19/08: Various resolutions posted in the thread.

SwiftFox is an optimized build of Firefox. It uses a few methods to do this, most notably the compile options. I don’t use Swiftfox but I had to compile Firefox in Arch. I figured I would apply some of Swift’s optimizations to my own build. If you need a crash course in rebuilding Firefox in Arch Linux read the Arch Wiki for Firefox recompile. If you want more details of SwiftFox’s optimizations check out it’s source code page and Wikipedia entry.

Here are the following changes I made to the mozconfig file:
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Tupac is a front end to the Arch Linux package manager, Pacman. It’s very similar to Yaourt in that it has colored output and searches the AUR but does this all much faster. The speed is due to it’s cached implementation. All actual package installations are done with Yaourt. It was created by Pajaro and written in PHP.

Aside from the speed increase, search functionality was also improved. For instance if I search “city sim game” in Tupac I get the following results: lincity, lincity-ng, and opencity. If I do the same search in Yaourt or Pacman I will get many more unrelated results. For example I get back packages related to audacity and metacity.

Tupac is also written with other frontends in mind. As a proof of concept Pajaro has also more recently released Qupac. While still a new project it is very functional.

The only downside I could possible see with tupac is the fact that it is written in PHP and so depends on it being installed. Yaourt is a bash script and tupac it depends on it as well.

Both tupac and qupac can be found on the AUR.

I recently read a blog post that brought up some neat features of VirtualBox. It is a kinda how-to on getting VirtualBox+Windows to integrate into an Ubuntu desktop. I personally don’t have a need for virtualization but have used VMWare, Qemu, and VirtualBox to load up different distros.

Out of all of those mentioned above the only one I currently had installed was VirtualBox. I even had Windows XP on a virtual drive. There really wasn’t much to do with my setup to get seamless windows going. I hit Right CTRL+L and that was pretty much it. I even had Compiz going and didn’t run into any problems.

Since I didn’t really need Windows for anything this was more of a tinkering expedition. I loaded up some Silverlight sites. Most of the sites ran fine, which was to be expected. I tried watching Bill Gate’s keynote video, the audio was fine but the frame rate of the video was low. I’m sure this was just more of a hardware and/or configuration issue on my part though.

Of all my Arch packages, the one that seems to run into the most problems when upgrading is VLC. I’ve gotten used to rebuilding it but reading the forums you can see this is still a challenge for many. The latest fix involves rebuilding ffmpeg without swscaler. Then applying this patch to VLC and rebuilding it.

Instructions and tips were posted but for some new to Arch and/or ABS they were still hard to follow. In comes bangkok_manouel to the rescue with this post. A very nice how-to style breakdown of what needs to be done.

I’ve personally switched to MPlayer, I’ve also recently discovered a very VLC-esque front end for it. It’s called SMplayer. All available in the Arch ‘extras’ repo.

Thayer Williams posted some nice widescreen Archlinux wallpaper on the Arch forums today. Preview below, you can download them from here.

Mugshot isn’t new but it’s still small and I believe invite only. I clicked a link to it on someone’s blog and got an invite via email. So not sure what happen there. Anyway I really dig this service, it ties up all of your “weblife” into one hub. In one spot my friends would be able to see what I’ve dugg recently, pictures added to my flickr account, my recent bookmarks , blog posts, etc. It doesn’t support everything yet but it’s growing.

Best of all you can share and view activies via RSS feeds or it’s desktop application. The desktop app has a version for every OS too.

For Arch users the package in the community repo is out of date and orphaned. Check out this thread to find out what you need to do to compile it.