WMP54GS Under Linux

[Shibathedog]

I got the image to load when i tried again, and the icons are about that size if i remember right

 

BTW is that the new Gnome?

[Grey]

Hmmm... Well, the icon sizes are adjustable. Just open up Nautilus and go to Edit->Preferences, and you can change the scaling of your icons, to make them smaller or bigger as you choose. I believe that those icons are either at 50% or 75%... but I'm on my laptop right now.

 

And yeah, that's Gnome 2.14.1, which comes standard with Dapper. Of course, I've made a lot of customizations to it though. A few things that I've done...

 

1) Swapped the top and bottom panels

2) Moved the drive icons to the bottom panel

3) Added temperature monitoring to my bottom panel

4) Added CPU, Memory, Hard drive usage graphs to the bottom panel

5) Enabled transparency on both the top and bottom panels, with a black background colour.

6) Wallpaper image is randomly rotated every 30 minutes.

7) My laptop has a wallpaper image of the earth, which has accurate cloud cover to within 3 hours, and shows the light/day map to an accuracy of within 10 minutes. It also features accurate stars in the background.

 

On my laptop, I am running AIGLX/Compiz, so it's a lot lot fancier. Transparency is all over the place, as are other 3D accelerated effects, such as wobbling windows, and the whole thing being rendered on a cube.

Edited June 5, 2006 by Grey

[Shibathedog]

wow thats pretty cool, is all that stuff hard to do?

 

ive always used KDE, but maybe i should switch to Gnome

[Grey]

I have a friend who loves KDE, and can't deal with Gnome. I'm the opposite with KDE... it's just too busy for my liking, although I use some KDE applications on a regular basis (K3B, KStars).

 

And no, none of what I posted is hard to do. That's the real beauty of Linux, is the amount of customization available to you. I can easily give you my scripts for the more complex stuff too. (which were in turn taken from someone else, and customized for my liking)

[Shibathedog]

wow that would be great

 

im downloading ubuntu now, i think ill try going with gnome this time

 

i remember with Mandrake there was a way to install both, can you do that with ubuntu?

[Grey]

Yup. Ubuntu's KDE is actually quite nice, and I actually do have it installed on my laptop.

 

To install KDE:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

 

To install Gnome:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

 

To install XFCE (EXTREMELY nice):

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

[Shibathedog]

ive never even heard of XFCE, im gonna go look for some screenshots

[Grey]

XFCE is another GTK based DE, like Gnome, but extremely light and fast. I was never really happy with XFCE before, but Dapper has the most awesome XFCE build I've ever seen. It's simply incredible. You can find a screenshot tour here:

 

http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slidesho....06+screenshots

[Shibathedog]

awesome thanks, im installing Ubuntu on my PC now, do you know if it supports the wireless card i have or do i have to do the NDIS wrapper thing again?

[Grey]

Sorry, I've been away for a while. It has a Broadcom chipset... which isn't well supported in Linux. (Complain to Broadcom, and tell them to release technical specs, so someone can program a driver, or tell them to write one, so they can compete with the likes of Intel, Atheros, and Ralink). Broadcom really isn't well supported at all.

 

At any rate, it should work fine in ndiswrapper. To install it in Ubuntu (you need a network connection of some kind), you can install it simply through "sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils ndisgtk". Then you should have a shortcut somewhere in the menu for a nice graphical application to install the windows drivers. You may need to enable the universe and/or multiverse repositories though for those apps. (not hard, check out www.ubuntuguide.org).

[Shibathedog]

thank you very much

 

Is it difficult to configure the card for my network afterwords? (it uses WPA encryption and stuff)