.mrt memo

Hardware: VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility X1400.

So I have *buntu Hardy 8.04 with KDE 4.1 and wanted some wobbly windows. Ubuntu 8.04 with Gnome desktop has Compiz working by default, but Kubuntu with KDE 3.5 is a bit left behind on that regard. But the chances are good that you have the necessary hardware to run Compiz by yourself. It seems, in case of Nvidia cards, you don’t need Xgl, but with ATI it’s a musthave.

I wanted to write down the memo of how I got it working, but as I tried quite few tricks, I’m not so sure anymore. When I had buried all hope because of evil commentators all around the net talking how bad the ATI drivers are and what a lame ass X.org server it is that cannot do this and that on Kubuntu, I decided to still try it out and seem to have gotten it to work with a mixture of suggestions. So I’ll try to remember, how I did it, in the hopes that it’ll help somebody even a bit.

So here’s the software you need to install (at least):

sudo apt-get install compiz-core compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-plugins libcompizconfig0 compiz-kde compiz-plugins compizconfig-backend-kconfig compizconfig-settings-manager kicker-compiz kicker-taskbar-compiz fusion-icon xserver-xgl

Open Kcontrol(alt+f2 then type in ‘kcontrol’) and navigate to Desktop >> Multiple Desktops and change the number of desktops to 1. Close Kcontrol and remove the Desktop Preview & Pager and the Taskbar from the panel. Right click on the panel and select ‘Add Applet To Panel’. Add ‘Desktop Preview & Pager – Compiz’ and ‘Taksbar – Compiz’ to replace the old ones.

compiz –replace

Now after I got some KDE errors and had lost hope, I shut my PC down and went shopping. Then a bit later, refreshed and ready, returned to the task but discovered Compiz Fusion already working. So I guess my suggestion would be to reboot your machine after all the above.

Links

Kubuntuguide.org

Putty is a nice cross-platform toolset with terminal emulator and keypair generation tool (puttygen) among others, but when you want to take your keypair with you to a normal Linux environment (meaning OpenSSH and the ~/.ssh directory), then you cant just copy-paste the keys under the .ssh directory. There are some formatting issues and after some research I found out that fortunately you can convert a Puttygen generated keypair into normal OpenSSH format. So here’s a memo of these commands (-O means what to export and -o gives the name of an output file):

puttygen putty_generated_private_key_file.ppk -O private-openssh -o id_rsa

puttygen putty_generated_private_key_file.ppk -O public-openssh -o id_rsa.pub

After that you just copy-paste the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files under your ~/.ssh directory.

Further reading:
puttygen man page

Lühiülevaade tulevast Firefox 3-st.

http://people.mozilla.com/~beltzner/overview-of-firefox3.swf

Ingenious comment on OOninja.com:

“OOwriter needs tab browsing like Firefox. Everyday I need several documents open at once.”

Update 20080405

Many thanks go to Andrew Z from OOOninja for directing my attention to OOo Tabs extension. It’s something similar to what I thought, but not quite.

• You cannot navigate through tabs with the usual ctrl+tab/ctrl+shift+tab
• you cannot close tabs with ctrl+w
• well also the right click menu on the tabs bar doesn’t give you the option to close a tab – you simply have to go File->Close
• and the tab titles don’t reflect the titles of the documents, simply “my windowN”
• I hope they learn from Firefox, fix the previously mentioned discomforts, also closing “X” would be nice
• and in the future I hope they also get to implementing Firefox’s FishEyeTabs, as I cannot live without it anymore .