Monday, January 28, 2008

Compiz In 3D

Many thanks for "wodor" for updating the anaglyph plugin to compile with the latest version of Compiz. While certainly one could not sit and work at their desk all day with this plugin enabled, it shows that the community is thinking outside the box. The current plugin requires the old style red/blue glasses but I made the recommendation today to see if it can be changed to work with the newer polarized style.

Keep up the good work guys. Not everything can be deployed, but I'm enjoying the ride.

(shot below)

Friday, January 11, 2008

Largo Updates

Things have been busy for me in the new year, and I thought I would relay my current projects:

Evolution Debugging
I have been working with Sankar and Chen on improving Evolution on SLED 10 SP1. We have made some gains, but still have more work to reach my goal. I received -debug packages from Novell and we are now auto-generating crash dumps when users crash. The good news is that all of these patches should be landing in 2.21 as well and will help advance Evolution connectivity to GroupWise.

Kyle TX Visit
The City of Kyle TX did a site visit and sent us a really nice email message with their observations. I think that people in general have seen so little of the Linux desktop and Compiz that they are shocked when they see how far it's come in the last few years. We demonstrated license free authentication, desktop presentation, email, web surfing and groupware. We also demonstrated single click access to MS Windows applications. I'm very glad they took the time to visit and wish them the best of luck.

Testing NoMachine NX
We are evaluating NoMachine as a replacement for Metaframe For Unix. We use Citrix for our distant remote sites that are connected over lower bandwidth lines. We have always had to keep a Sparc machine around just for this function. So far, NoMachine is running well and they seem to have some things on their possible road map that will be very useful to us; PulseAudio support and compositing for Compiz.

New OpenOffice Server
Our current OpenOffice still runs well and has been in production since 2003. However, it needs an operating system refresh in order to allow me to build the current PulseAudio. Pulse will allow the users to hear sounds in their Impress documents and anywhere else where sounds are present.

Weather-Wallpaper
This is completely bling, but the users love it. I have added weather-wallpaper to the desktop server. It automatically generates wallpaper based on the weather in the Largo Florida area. By default it requires users to enter the NOAA code for our area. Weather-wallpaper creates a directory called .weather-wallpaper which contains your personal settings. So all I did was get it working correctly and put a tarball of this directory into /u2/local/skel which is extracted for the users immediately before it's launched. This eliminates completely them having to do anything, and restores it back to a working state if they tinker. (shot below)