and all through the net, not a thing stirred, not even a mouse.
Well i'm sitting here counting down the hours till I hop on a plane and head off to New York. The heavy fog that caused chaos at Heathrow had me worried for a while, but as it cleared up over 48 hours ago, I'm hoping that they have got through the backlog, or at least got things back on schedule for my flight out at 0900. So as I have packed my bags and done all the things that need to be done I thought I'd have a look around the net while I had some spare time and write up a blog.
It's rare that I get excited about something in GUI land (graphical user interfaces) and it's even rarer when i havn't heard of it before stumbling onto it, but that was the case with Beryl. I had read some vague articles a year or two back about "composite window managers" and thought to myself that it would be good to have something decent for linux, but had then consigned it to the back of my mind. Of course in recent times (though the hype seems to have died down a bit of late) Max OSX has made lots of headlines about nice, friendly usable unix AND, most importantly, it's gorgeous GUI. Us linux users on the other hand have been stumbling along with KDE and Gnome for years thinking that while it's not that pretty, it's very functional and stable (my desktop at work, arguably one of the most abused machines in the world, has been up and stable without crashes [well at least not self induced ones] for about 8 months). We'd long since given up on actually playing games, well all the sensible ones had, there are of course a bunch of die hard Linux users that like to spend five times longer trying to get the game to run under cedega then they do actually playing the game, but hey it takes all types right? Personally the ONLY reason I have a windows partition at all on my desktop machine at home is to play games on and that's been the way since I left my amiga's. So you can imagine my surprise when crawling around the gentoo wiki I stumbled upon some screen shots of what looked like a REALLY sexy GUI. Further investigation wasn't to let me down and I was shortly examining Beryl in some detail and then installing it on my new home desktop. I'll side track here and say that I recently decided that I needed a new desktop at home, primarily because I bought a new Dell 24inch widescreen monitor and it's native resolution required a newer graphics card then what my old machine had. That in turn meant that I needed a new motherboard ... one thing led to another and the next thing I know I've spent a small fortune on what is comparatively, the best machine I've ever bought. By comparatively I mean that, I normally buy the 3rd or 4th best of each component on the market, that way you seem to hit an optimal point of performance and cost. At this point in my life though, I'm not constrained by the cost anymore and so I decided on getting something a little better ;) Needless to say I now have a machine capable of running a small supercomputing lab and my spare room (or my computer room as my ex liked to call it), now has a strong resemblence to a wind tunnel.
So here I am with a brand new machine running linux at a pace that I didn't think was possible AND a new, incredibly sexy yet functional GUI. Santa seems to have visited me early this year.
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