Wow. Turn your back on eye candy for a few weeks, and it just jumps up at you.
First, the new SLED menu for GNOME developed by Novell was dropped into GNOME CVS as 'slab'. Of course, people have customized it for their favourite distribution, and so now there are Fedora and Ubuntu packages of it available. Keep an eye on the plan to get the slab into Edgy Eft.
A lady by the name of QuinnStorm has done some amazing work with Novell's XGL and Compiz, really building a community around it. I track the development version of compiz, which just keeps picking up new and useful features - I don't really like the Expose-like funtionality, so I went to see how to turn it off, and fell over a new window decorator instead. Cool. (If you have the bug that you can't seem to turn off hot corners, read the compiz.net forum on the issue.)
A great list of things to configure about Compiz can be found on the Ubuntu wiki. Someone wrote a program called gset-compiz to do this all for you, but development hasn't kept up with the rapid pace of Compiz changes. (Hint: to stop background windows appearing faded out, disable the "trailfocus" plugin, and try hitting Ctrl-Windows or Shift-F9 if you have "water" in your list of enabled plugins!)
It also turns out that the aforementioned slab is available from QuinnStorm's repository. Is there anything she doesn't do? The only criticism I've seen is that the domain could be slightly more trustworthy-sounding than "beer or kid". Tough choice, even for someone who doesn't drink beer...
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he he
yeah back when I hosted automatix there were a few who mentioned the name was not too professional.
there are mirrors that are more appropriate though, like:
http://xgl.compiz.info/
http://ubuntu.compiz.net/
I just have a bunch of bandwidth to spare, 2 tb, so it is better that people hit me than load the other servers up.
Yeah Quinn is awesome.
Thanks for the hosting - it's really really popular, and thus really good.
I take it those are mirrors, and not aliases to your server? Perhaps, at the risk of your identity through sponsorship, you could solve the issue with a CNAME to your domain?
well according to quinnstorm they arr mirrors, at least these two are:
deb http://media.blutkind.org/xgl/ dapper main
deb http://ubuntu.compiz.net/ dapper main
during july my dir (www.beerorkid.com/compiz) had 1,173,172 hits.
now most of that is the daily update checks.
I got concerned when I saw I was about to do 1.5tb in a month from the repo from an estimate of trafic from my host. I freaked and she found some other bandwidth donators. Yet it still does about 800gb a month. Some of them packages and the constant updates takes its toll.
I am just happy to be able to give back to the community that has given me so much.
Nice site BTW.