xabbott.blg

I don’t currently dual boot but I have in the past. I’ve always wondered if a Linux swap partition could be used by Windows for it’s virtual memory/swap file. I never wondered enough to look for a solution though.

Apparently it is possible and has been for some time. How? With an open source driver called SwapFS, which works with NT, 2000, and XP.

The SwapFS page also contains links to similar drivers. One of them which I used while I did dual boot, EXT2 IFS. It made my EXT3 partitions visible to Windows. I was able to read and write to the partitions too. I did have issues deleting some files that were created under Linux though.  This may have been fixed since I last used it.

I just noticed I can’t post my .bashrc properly on here. It strips some chars out of the color codes. So I thought I’d put them on Pastebin but the site is melting. So I used Arch’s pastebin:.bashrc, .dir_colors, .Xdefaults.

If you want even more configuration file goodness check out Vico’s little Linux site and dotfiles.org.

Ok so my last Metisse post was really just a Mandriva rant. I compiled and installed it on Arch today. The website’s build documentation is good and easy to follow. Basically just configure, make, install. I did use -enable-glx-x86 and –enable-mmx on the Metisse configure.

Once it was all installed you have a few ways to start it, which are explained here. I did it the “easy” way. I already boot into runlevel 3 and run startx. So I just created a new .xinitrc for Metisse with the following in it.

Xmetisse -ac -depth 24 -geometry 1280x1024 :1 >& .Xmetisse-log &
metisse-start-fvwm >& .compositor-log &
urxvt # this will allow you to terminate this session by typing "exit" and to
# restart the compositor using metisse-start-fvwm if it ever crashes
killall Xmetisse

Pretty much ripped from the official instructions with the terminal, resolution, and color depth changed.

I immediatly noticed two things my fonts and cursor. My fonts looked very very small, I assume it had something to do with a dpi setting. The cursor and the area around it was covered by a large flickering black box. I opened up Firefox and started reading how to do all the cool stuff I’ve seen in the videos.

I move some windows around, zoom them, spin them, etc. You can do all of this with hotkeys or mouse clicks on certain areas. I try to take a screen shot with Scrot but it only captured the background. Reading further I see you need to use a capture hotkey that outputs to jpg.

I then start to open up many windows and attempt use the multiple desktops. This whole process is very slow and clumsy.

You can’t drag the window to another desktop. You can’t grab the little window representations in the pager. I right clicked the window border itself hoping for a menu, nope. You have to right click the menu icon in the window title bar, this gives you a copy of the pager which is same size as the one already on the screen.

The navigation was just as bad, moving to another desktop makes the windows appear to slide away or into view but slowly. Also zooming out to view all nine desktops didn’t make navigation any better. When you click on a desktop while zoomed out you have to watch the background image slowly move from one desktop to your destination, then you can zoom back in.

It wasn’t all bad though, one feature that is unique to Metisse is the ability to cut and paste parts from an application. This worked surprisingly well and unlike many of the other features was fairly intuitive. I was able to cut out the file explorer from Rox, my Gmail status and Google search bar from Firefox, then paste them into one window. I don’t have any personal uses for this but just seeing it in action was nice. It functions in such a way that it is still affecting and being affected by the original. If you resize the original windows or close them your “custom” window will not look right anymore.

The only other note worthy thing was the quasi radial menu. If you held and dragged the corner of the window this nice menu would appear around your cursor. I’ve always wondered why this type of a menu wasn’t used more often.

Recalling the Metisse videos I can’t help but be reminded of a subpar movie with all the good parts in the trailer. It’s not ready for prime time (yet) and I have no idea why Mandriva is shipping it with thier live disc.

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.