Xeffects cleanup and some Portage news...

Well, two exciting things happening in the Xeffects overlay for Gentoo; a) Lot's of QA clean-up to make things better for the end user and b) a proposal by the Xeffects admins and some Gentoo developers to make a new Desktop Effects Herd.

What does this mean? Well, once the clean-up is done, we will be looking at moving some apps from Xeffects into regular portage and maintaining them officially. Finally, Gentoo will have some official bleeding edge support for things like Compiz-Fusion, that any user can test spin without having to use layman or setup a cumbersome overlay via svn or something similar.

A wider audience will also mean more bugs will be revealed and hopefully we can get them fixed upstream quickly. This will help make the entire experience better for all.

I'll follow-up when I have more news on this.

Xeffects new additions...

Been busy for the last few days, so haven't posted.

Here's a brief update on what's new in the xeffects overlay for KDE:

1) Taskbar - Compiz : This is a drop in replacement for the Kicker taskbar applet that attempts to play nice with compositing WM's (like beryl and compiz).

2) Kde Autostart manager : Ever wonder how to tell an app to start automatically from a default or new KDE session (other than saving the session)? This little gem provides a front end to your .~/.kde/Autostart folder and allows you to add apps from your K-Menu to Autostart.



3) KIO Resouces : Added a new KDE IO Slave which allows you to type a URL like resources:/ to access configs, wallpapers, etc., and not having to remember that these could be stored local to your user, or system-wide. For example, resources:/wallpapers will show all wallpapers available. You can add new ones and it will save to your local .kde dir.

Anyway, for additional info, please read the full posts on the xeffects forums under KDE/Kickoff.

-Rod

Beryl, AIGLX and Intel...

I am amazed everyday at the work being done on Beryl. I started back last summer, working with a couple of people trying to get Xgl and compiz working under Gentoo. We spent long hours making packages, install scripts, etc., just to make it run.

Back then, there we a couple of basic plugins like cube, wobbly windows, and basic window decorations. Today, there are a plethora of plugins included with Beryl, and more being developed everyday.

Of course, Beryl is a fork of Compiz, and for Gentoo, a couple of us maintain an overlay called Xeffects which has Beryl among other things.

For me, I have an Acer 9412 Laptop with an Intel 945GME, and I can tell you, that everything is sweet. Now, even the water plugin (which was previously not working on Intel) works wonderful.

Linux Desktop Revolution...

I been recently helping out adding improvement patches to Gentoo's distribution via the Xeffects overlay.

Gentoo is a great Linux OS which is source based. Gentoo supports managing and creating an overlay which allows you to customize individual packages.

What does this mean? Well, when people are testing modifications and improvements to things like KDE, X, etc, you can take these patch files and make an overlay to test them one Gentoo as well.

Xeffects is such an overlay, and contains fixes to KDE, as well as other desktop improvements for Gentoo (like Beryl).

Beryl is a Revolutionary way to look at your desktop and shows exactly what Linux can achieve, which is far beyond anything Vista has to offer.

Beryl is an branch of Compiz, which was originally developed as a proof of concept by Novel. The source was released to the public, and it has developed beyond a simple proof of concent into a full blown replacement window manager.