Linux Desktop

Hmm I'd forgotten how nice the linux desktop (Well Gnome 2.16 any way) was compared to Windows XP. Any way after recompiling the kernel, and installing the various apps that I need to linux I think I'll be making it my primary desktop leaving Windows XP for Gaming.

Had a decent bit of configuration to do first though:

• Install NTFS write support - NTFS-3g
• Configure Wireless network using the OSS driver
  
• Configure URPMI via easy urpmi
• Install mplayer and codecs
• Recompile Kernel to get rid of the junk
• Install Beagle Search
• Add Windows fronts
• Install Mozilla versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and link them to the windows version profiles so that both the windows versions and linux versions of the programs are kept in sync
• Install Liferea which is by far one of the best RSS readers around, much nicer than the windows ones I'd been using
• Check Gthumb is insatlled for Camera support
• Update Gaim to latest version
• Install Azureus and Java JRE for Bittorrent support

Any way the result is a nice functioning linux desktop currently with 10 applications open, (Azureus, Firefox, Thunderbird, Banshee, Liferea, Gnome-terminal, Gaim, beagle search and other minor ones) the result of which I'm using 700KB of swap memory, while in Windows XP that would be about 500MB of swap memory.

Apart from that I'm also running AIGLX accelerated desktop so I've all the fancy 3d effects and such which windows is clearly lacking.

About the only thing I've not got working yet is suspend to RAM, which isn't exactly critical for me thankfully.



My Desktop with the FFX and Mplayer made Transparent


Expose like feature.