Compiz on Dell Inspiron 1420N Working

I have followed many tutorials for how to get Compiz working on Ubuntu 7.04 aka Feisty Fawn. However all up untill today have either hosed my system or not worked. However, today in the Linux Action Show forums oblong sent me a link to something that did work. Check the tread here. Also the information I used is available here. Ok, here is what to do step by step.

1) edit your /etc/apt/sources.list by typing 
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

2) change these lines:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty main restricted universe multiverse

To this:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

then save the file

3) Then run these commands
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get -t gutsy install xserver-xorg-video-intel
(I got some errors but nothing that seemed fatal so I just ignored them)

sudo apt-get -t gutsy install linux

sudo apt-get -t gutsy install libgl1-mesa-dri

4) Go into the System->prefs->Desktop Effects and enable the effects they should just work now NO CRASHING like before... (note I did not try to enable the 3d cube as I only use one workspace)

Hey I have been working on a talkshoe podcast it is located at http://www.mmajumpnow.com. It is about mixed martial arts. I have a new blog for that show at http://jumpnow.blogspot.com. Its alot of fun come check it out on tuesday at 8:00.

sauerbraten Open Source fps for Linux (and Windows)

To see the project go to the sauerbraten at http://sauerbraten.org/. This is a very good  fps for Linux but to install it you need to do a couple of things. Here are the instructions for Ubuntu Edgy on Linux.

1. make sure you have all the repositories uncomment in your sources.list here is how
   
2. run this from the terminal: sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 libsdl-{image,mixer}1.2
3. download the linux version from sourceforge (the tar.gz version at the top)
   
4. extract it with the archive manager and put it in your home folder
5. Move cube to /opt: sudo mv ~/sauerbraten /opt
6. Edit /opt/sauerbraten/sauerbraten_unix.
   Line 2: CUBE_DIR=/opt/sauerbraten (i changed the commented out line above the line with the .)
7. Link over: sudo ln -s /opt/sauerbraten/sauerbraten_unix /usr/local/bin/sauerbraten
8. Execute: sauerbraten

now for making the changes to allow you to do things like change your in game name edit the file config.cfg which is located at /opt/sauerbraten/config.cfg

technorati tags:sauerbraten, howto, install, ubuntu, shooter, person, first, fps, opensource, sourceforge

Freespire 2.0 Alpha is out

http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Download_Freespire#Freespire_2.0_Alpha Go here to check it out

I just got done trying out the Freespire 2.0 Alpha and from what I can see Freespire 2.0 is going to be one of the best distributions on release.  Obviously there were bugs but most of them are simple fixes. It is not recommended that a person would install this as there primary OS because it still points to the Debian repository's.  One interesting feature is that Freespire 2.0 has true transparency out of the box on my machine.  This is the first time I have had this even working on my machine let alone right out of the box. It has also been updated to the newest version of KDEdistribution than 1.0.

and feels like it is a much better

technorati tags:freespire, linux, distro, KDE

RAM usage by different os and window managers

I decided to do a test on how much RAM different operating systems and window managers take-up on a computer right after startup. Note that all of these operating systems had fair playing ground because I decided to use them in parallels and not on my actual machine and allocated them all 256 MB of RAM. For my first test I tried Windows XP light. It took up 95 MB of RAM. I decided not to try the original copy of Windows XP because I knew it would take way more RAM than what I was looking for an operating system.

Next I decided I would switch to a Linux operating system. I chose Ubuntu Edgy to do my tests on. With the gnome window manager it use 74 MB of RAM. I was not too impressed with that considering that Windows XP light only took up 95 makes him which is only slightly more than gnome takes up. Bare in mind that in Linux I decided to use the gnome system stats monitor to do all of my recordings of RAM usage. The next window manager I tried was KDE. Not surprisingly it took a more RAM than gnome but less RAM than Windows. It took up a total of 80 MB of RAM.

Afterwards I decided to try some lightweight window managers in Ubuntu to see how much RAM usage they would take up. The first one I tried was XFCE. I suspected it would take up a lot less RAM than it did. Surprisingly it took up a total of 68.1 MB of RAM. Which is only slightly less than amount of RAM gnome took up. I guess I should not be as shocked as I was to find out how much RAM XFCE took considering that it is built on the GTK2 framework. Next I decided to try icewm. It is quite a bit different than the other window managers in Linux. It is a little more difficult to set up however it is very intuitive to use. Icewm stores all the settings in text files that can be edited. It's actually not very hard to use once you get used to it. Icewm also looked like it was straight out of 1995. But that's fine because it came in a minuscule 52.7 MB of RAM which is far superior to any of the other window managers in Linux and its especially better than Windows RAM usage. So there you have it, icewm came in first. XFCE came in second. Gnome came in third. KDE came in forth. Last and certainly least was Windows XP light.

It was hard for me to figure out a fair way to test the boot times in the different operating systems without actually installing each one individually on my machine. I will give you a rough estimate of how fast they were. It's hard for me to test a startup speed between Ubuntu in Windows XP light I actually don't know which one was faster owned boot. My guess would be Ubuntu but only slightly. However within the window managers it was clear that icewm was the fastest and did not require any time to load. Then gnome and XFCE only required a small amount of time and a splash screen. In last was KDE which took a little while at a splash screen.

technorati tags:XFCE, Windows, icewm, KDE, Gnome, lite, XP, window, managers

Edgy Eft Knot3 Released

The Edgy Eft Knot 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 6.10, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. Improvements have been made all around such as faster system boot up times, faster GNOME start up times, improvements to the user interface, a shiny new optimized kernel, GNOME 2.16, and much, much more.

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Linspire Does Away with Annual Fee for "Click 'N Run" Linux Service

Linspire, developer of the commercial desktop Linux operating system of the same name and Freespire, the free community desktop Linux operating system, announced the immediate change in pricing for its popular CNR ("Click 'N Run") Service from an annual subscription fee based offering to a completely free service.

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