Archive for the ‘Ubuntu’ Category

Getting gdesklets to work with Beryl on startup

Friday, July 13th, 2007

I had written about my move to Ubuntu a few days back . One of my favorite apps is the beryl window manager , It absolutely kicks a** . I also like the gdesklets application but there was a small problem when i tried to put them both into startup .I don’t know how many people have faced this, I was looking for a solution at the Ubuntu forums and found that it happens to be a registered bug over at Launchpad.

One workaround which my brother came up with is to make a small script which looks something like this.

$ beryl-manager
$ sleep 10
$ gdesklets start

Remove both beryl and gdesklets from startup and place this script in the startup . Works fine for us . Hope it helps someone .

GoodBye Windows, Hello! Linux

Monday, July 9th, 2007

Well , I finally did it . Over the last weekend I moved to Ubuntu 7.0 feisty fawn Amd64 edition , and boy it sure does rock . I’ve used other distributions like Fedora core and Suse before , but for the first time I feel that I can get rid of my windows installation for good.

This is not about how to install and configure Ubuntu, trust me! its simpler than you think, so I ll leave that to the readers. What this is about is Why you should move to Linux .

The strongest reason to move is Freedom , and by freedom I don’t mean price . Once you have Ubuntu installed , you have access to a list of thousands of applications which you have the freedom to download install and modify to suit your needs . It doesn’t matter if you are an expert computer user or a newbie , Ubuntu’s software library provides enough to suit everyone’s needs . There are no trial versions or registration keys , no exe’s to patch, no more crackspider or astalavista

I believe the key to the success of Windows lies in its usability , Ubuntu is not yet on par with Windows XP or Vista on this front , but it’s awfully close . Installing new software is a breeze, no restarts , no configurations . The package managers downloads, installs and configures the software for you. All you need is a good broadband connection.

Hardcore gamers will have problems moving because games as of now remain a Win32 exclusive. but there are some utilities like Wine which can run Windows applications efficiently.I am an Arcade fanatic and all popular emulators like Mame etc are available for Linux and Yes! they do perform better than their windows cousins.

If for nothing else you should move to Linux for the change, Its faster and more efficient than Windows XP. I won’t compare Ubuntu with Vista because I’ve never used the latter. Readers are free to comment
My rig is powered by an Amd X2 processor and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM running on a nVidia 430 chipset , and I’ve got Ubuntu running with all its glory. If you may need any help with your rig, do write to me .

Spread the word , go Linux.

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