Bring on the Bling

Last night I gave in and decided to try out some desktop bling for my computer. My pimp'd out desktop can be seen below:



All I had to do was to enable compiz since with Foresight it comes installed by default just not enabled. I also wanted to check out Avant Window Navigator, it is the dockbar that is on the bottom of the screenshot. I also wanted to check out Affinity, it is the new menu that is in the top left corner of the desktop. If you want to install either of them on Foresight use the following commands:


sudo conary update avant-window-navigator
sudo conary update affinity


However, I do have some issues with compiz so if anybody out there has any solutions please let me know. Here are my issues:

• When I switch desktops with the Cube, i.e. alt+ctl+(left or right), it doesn't really switch desktops it just minimizes the open applications and then they will reappear after the cube spins around for the number of desktops I have, so after 4 spins. So to sum up I can't switch desktop with keyboard shortcuts.


• The desktop switcher in the bottom right corner will not display what applications are open on each desktop. It works fine without compiz enabled.

UPDATE:
I fixed Avant Window Manager to the correct name Avant-window-navigator. Sorry for any confusion.

Chicago Gnome User Group

I am interested in starting up a Gnome User Group in Chicago. If you or your friends are interested in joining/helping out with this group please join us in #gnome-chi on irc.gnome.org. If you know any Gnome developers or fan boys in the Chicagoland area let me know if they would be interested in our group.

Lights Camera Action

Videos of some previous presentations done at Chicago GLUG meetings have been posted here on our website. The current videos are for the following presentations: Dirvish by John Quigley, VSFTPD Virtual Users by myself and Objective-C by Yacin Nadji. Look for more videos of our presentations and events in the future.

[UPDATE]
The videos are licensed under the GFDL, so the videos are free to distribute in accordance with that license.

My Homepage Has Returned

It has been awhile since I had a homepage up, but now I have one back up. My homepage can be found here. I finally just decided to setup Apache on my current machine since my old server that 'died' has been robbed for parts to get my current machine back up and running. There will be updates to my homepage, once I get my blog software finished and move my blog away from blogger.

TurboGears: Gearing Up the Web

Today (Saturday, April 14th), I will be giving a presentation on TurboGears to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group. If you would like to come to the meeting and hear my excellent presentation, the meeting is at Centro (444 N. Wells Suite 601 Chicago IL, 60610) at 3:00 pm. The other presentations for this meeting are Brewing and ZipIt Wireless Messenger. Yes, brewing does not deal first hand with GNU/Linux but what goes better with GNU/Linux than beer, ala 'Free As In Beer'.

If you would like to check out the demo code that I will be using for my presentation you can check out the code from my SVN repo:

svn co http://guido.specialkevin.com/svn/TurboGallery/TurboGallery-Demo

If you don't have/like svn you can download it here. If you would like to download my presentation slides you get them here(pdf, odp).

Hope to see you there.

[Update]
Sorry I forgot to give Nadav Samet credit for the demo code. Here wrote TurboGallery demo to show off the power of TurboGears during a presentation that he did and I really liked his example. Thanks again Nadav.