Okay so the world has gone compiz crazy, but some of us still use metacity (the default gnome window manager, no fancy wobbles), personally i use metacity over compiz simply because its a bit more stable and for a machine that i work at that’s important, when I’m just checking emails or ircing or whatever compiz is great.
The problem with plain ol’ metacity is two-fold, no transparencies and no gpu acceleration - thus stepping in is composite mode :)

Just to make clear, transparencies are needed not for the nice looks but to get things like avant window navigator and cairo clock working, these need a compositing window manager. using gpu acceleration mearly means that instead of having your cpu waste time and effort drawing your windows, you get your barley used graphics chip to do it.

To turn on metacity compositing you just have to run the following command

gconftool-2 --type=bool --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager True

If all went well you should have nice shadows around your windows.
To turn off metacity compositing you can run the following command

gconftool-2 --type=bool --set /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager False

For various reasons i run irssi locally on the box that use, i also use fnotify.pl in order to get pretty notifications when someone wants my attention, alas fnotify.pl is designed to be used remotly over ssh, great if you have a load of boxes and don’t run irssi on the box your using. but for people like me it was a bit clunky and annoying (had to run a seperate script to read the files it wrote, the script would often get caught up in gnome sessions without exiting causing lots of scripts to be loaded after several logons)

So i altered the fnotify.pl script to work entirely out of one script (thats loaded into irssi via the normal methods). this has the side effect of only working localy but for anyone else like me, its a rather usefull addition. you’ll need notify-send installed.

# todo: grap topic changes

use strict;
use vars qw($VERSION %IRSSI);

use Irssi;
$VERSION = '0.0.3';
%IRSSI = (
	authors     => 'Thorsten Leemhuis',
	contact     => 'fedora@leemhuis.info',
	name        => 'fnotify',
	description => 'Write a notification to a file that shows who is talking to you in which channel.',
	url         => 'http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fnotify/',
	license     => 'GNU General Public License',
	changed     => '$Date: 2007-01-13 12:00:00 +0100 (Sat, 13 Jan 2007) $'
);

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# In parts based on knotify.pl 0.1.1 by Hugo Haas
# http://larve.net/people/hugo/2005/01/knotify.pl
# which is based on osd.pl 0.3.3 by Jeroen Coekaerts, Koenraad Heijlen
# http://www.irssi.org/scripts/scripts/osd.pl
#
# Other parts based on notify.pl from Luke Macken
# http://fedora.feedjack.org/user/918/
#
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# Private message parsing
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

sub priv_msg {
	my ($server,$msg,$nick,$address,$target) = @_;
	filewrite($nick." " .$msg );
}

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# Printing hilight's
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

sub hilight {
    my ($dest, $text, $stripped) = @_;
    if ($dest->{level} & MSGLEVEL_HILIGHT) {
	filewrite($dest->{target}. " " .$stripped );
    }
}

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# The actual printing
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
sub filewrite {
	my ($text) = @_;
	# FIXME: there is probably a better way to get the irssi-dir...
    #    open(FILE,">>$ENV{HOME}/.irssi/fnotify");
	#print FILE $text . "\n";
    #    close (FILE);
    $text =~ s/\n/ /;
    $text =~ s/[<@&]//g;

    my @values = split(’ ‘, $text, 2);

    `notify-send -t 5000 -u critical -c im.received -i /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/emotes/face-surprise.svg “$values[0]” “$values[1]“`;

}

#——————————————————————–
# Irssi::signal_add_last / Irssi::command_bind
#——————————————————————–

Irssi::signal_add_last(”message private”, “priv_msg”);
Irssi::signal_add_last(”print text”, “hilight”);

#- end

I am almost constantly forgetting about my tv programs, i don’t have many so the chances of me actually remembering to watch them are rather slim, I don’t have any mythbuntu like setup either so no recording if i miss it either.

On tv is a godsend though, its a small panel applet that will sit and allow me to check on what programs are currently on and also, if you configure it to, remind me when a program comes on tv.

*IMPORTANT* on the initial configuration (if you are in the uk) choose the second UK option, (rt at the end). the first one does not work

Many of you will of already heard of preload I am sure, but for those that you that haven’t you really should enable it if you have more ram than you need (on an average ubuntu desktop i would say more than 512mb ram)

Basically there is a problem in the modern desktop in that they use a lot of data, so when you click on your firefox icon or whatever the exceptionable has to be loaded from the hard-drive then all the graphics it needs and then gtk and all the graphics it needs and so on, the problem with that is that hard-drives are slooooow. Preload simply sits in the background, monitoring the applications you use often. It then uses that data to “preload” the application data into your main memory. when you start your computer, then when you launch an application instead of loading from your hard-drive you load it from your nice fast ram.

I have been using it for quite a few months now and i can honestly say that yes it does work, application load times are much faster (before enabling preload on a new install on this computer i ached at how long it took to open simple applications like epiphany or evolution)

The only downside to this is that yes you will have longer boot-up times, but its really not by that much, it depends on how much stuff you generally do on your computer.

To install on ubuntu you just simply install the preload package

Is it just me or does ubuntu ask for your password far too much, i have to enter it a few times every day, a minor inconvenience at first but then it becomes a daily habit that you don’t even think about, which leads onto security flaws “oh you want my password, whatever, just get doing your thing”.

When a user is accustomed to performing a task such as this over and over again a malicious program simply has to run itself with gksudo and the user will happily enter their password and give the program root privileges, especially if you combine the gksudo with a custom message by passing –message “your message” to it, such as this:

Of course this completely bypasses the whole “how does the malicious program get onto your system in the first place” thing, but through my dealings with support requests I can say that people will find random debs/programs on the Internet and they will find ways of running them thinking that everything will be fine.

Do we really need to ask for root privilages so much or is this simply an education on security issue? either way I have a feeling we are sleepwalking into problems down the line.