Beryl with Feisty & Nvidia
I’d like to start by pointing out that there’s no logical reason to use Beryl as your default window manager - except for fun and eye candy! As Ubuntu Feisty makes the task of installing Beryl very easy, I’d wanted to give it a try. So, what do we need to do?
The following is intended for Nvidia based graphic boards with GeForce XXXX chip. If you have a different graphic chip you need to install the specific drivers for your video device. It is important that those drivers support 3D acceleration.
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Pidgin for Ubuntu Feisty
Ubuntu Feisty comes with a beta of Gaim 2 and I as tried to compile “MusicTracker” plugin for Pidgin (formerly Gaim) I ran into errors complaining that Pidgin was not installed. I don’t know if there would have been a way of forcing the plugin to compile with Gaim sources, so I went for installing Pidgin.
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Microsoft's "intellectual properties"...
Here’s an interesting interview by Duncan McLeod (Financial Mail, 8 June 2007) with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder, (not exclusively) about the recent deal by Microsoft and Linspire. It seams to be basically the same kind of “not-suing-each-other-for-infringement-of-unspecified-patents”-deal Microsoft made with Novell and Xandros. I can’t think of a good reason why any Linux distributor should agree to a deal like this…? Anyway, I’d like to quote a short part of this interview:
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Qemu with Debian Etch
Recently, I wrote something about installing VMware server on Ubuntu Edgy, which should basically work with Debian’s Etch, too. There is an alternative to VMware: Qemu. This peace of software also emulates a complete PC hardware and is opensource. To make Qemu faster it comes with a kernel module called “kqemu” which is free but distributed under a proprietary license until version 1.3.0pre9 - and this is the version Etch ships with. You may download the latest software from here, but I installed the default Debian packages and therefor I’ll write about this kind of installation.
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My Vista Experience, Pt. 3
Lately, I had some trouble installing a new Nvidia display driver: During installation of this driver Vista told me that “Age of Empires II Update 2” was not compatible with Vista… Er…? OK…..? The Nvidia installer ended without actually installing the driver and Vista then asked if it should try installing the program with recommended settings? Well, go ahead I thought… Now the Nvidia installer was sure it wasn’t running on Vista and quit. I rebooted and tried my luck again - no success. Still the installer quit because it could “run on Vista only” - though I was quite sure I was actually running Vista at this time! I guess the “recommended” settings emulate some kind of Windows XP environment - but I couldn’t turn this off again for this Nvidia installer. Well, I’m sure there would have been a solution to this but I wasn’t in the mood searching for it.
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