Roberto Live!

I’ve been using Compiz for a couple of weeks and it totally rocks! There are many fancy options that you can activate but some of them I find them too fancy for my taste, so I’m using only a few ones like the wobbly windows, or some transparency, and some nice effects for minimising and maximising. Although, above all, I like the expose (show all the windows in the desktop ala Mac). So the days of dark green consoles for Linux are gone. Well, more or less because the Compiz is still in development and relatively unstable, but if you don’t use all the fancy things is rather stable.

How to install it, well that’s the tricky part. Currently is not really difficult but maybe you should improvise so don’t despair if something goes wrong. I’m using Ubuntu Linux 6.10 Edgy Eft, and this is what I did:

1. Install the proprietary ATI drivers for Linux. If you have some doubts follow the instructions in the Ubuntu forums.
2. Install XGL (or AIGLX if you think is better, I went with XGL). The instructions here.
3. Now, the crucial moment: install actually Compiz. Follow the how-to of the official compiz site.
4. If you’ve done all correctly and survived all the unexpected things that always happens (always!!), now you should have Compiz, congrats, you kick ass. Anyway check this site for some small problems like the absence of shutdown button.

If you couldn’t install it, well sorry, you’re not a special one. Anyway most of the people are actually losers, and live an average life, so it doesn’t matter, surely you’ll live 78.6 years and have 2.18 children :P.

Some screenshots of my desktop:

The party is over!

The conferences are finished :(, but it was such a great experience. The last day Kathy Sierra was opened the day, there were a few conferences in security in Linux and the closing ceremony was funny enough. We got some blue/green glowing sticks, the purpose was to use them to move a giant Space Invaders game (green right, red left), so the idea was to use an “collective intelligence” to move the game on screen. Unfortunately it didn’t work but anyway the idea was rather cool.

Next linux.conf.au is in Melbourne, and I’m seriously thinking in cyber-begging, like these guys which made it just with donations.

Today I attended a scary PHP5 tutorial with Rasmus Lerdorf. Adobe Reader and Flash are so insecure, so much that it was scary!! Today was the open day, so there were good projects in the pavillion like the OLPC and a open-source Segway.

Yesterday was a day of surprises. The man, the big boss, the lord of the geeks, I mean Linus Torvalds in flesh showed up to present the keynote of Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum. That was a big surprise, and apparently all the problems between them are over. By the way, Tanenbaum is such a smart and funny guy, and he gave us a CD of Minix 3
The conferences were really good, I took one of the new database on Samba presented by Andrew Tridgell himself, he speaks very Aussie!! Remember to check the linux.conf.au 2007 album.

Today was another interesting and long day, Jono presented jokosher, which failed for a minute, hehe. And I attended other conferences with kernel developers and gamers in open-source software. At the end a party sponsored by Google.

If I’m not online is because I’ve been attending the linux.conf.au 2007 which (lucky me) is now again in Sydney! This is the major event of Linux and Open Source Software in the Southern hemiphesphere (according to them), so I’m very exicited to meeting nice people like the very developers of MySQL. Some pictures in the linux.conf.au 2007 album.