in quest of perfection

A few days back while i was surfing the net, i happened to found a site saying that beryl, the exotic eye candy for Linux distros, will no longer be developed but be supported. instead, Compiz and Beryl have been re-merged and taken the name Compiz Fusion .

Since then i was a bit curious about the outcome of the decision. Because even though Beryl is more eye-soothing but there is still something for Compiz to contribute in creating a more lucrative Linux desktop. My guess is somehow correct. Recently Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 has been released with some stunning effects that we have never seen before. i googled for binary package for FC6. but unfortunately i found nothing. Binary distributions i have found so far, are all for FC7, Ubuntu, SUSE etc. in spite of that, i have found some binaries of Compiz Fusion working smoothly on FC6. These RPM files can be downloaded from the following link:

http://jau.free.fr/compiz-fusion/i386

I have just downloaded all the RPM files from here(You don’t need to download devel or debug files if you are not doing development work with compiz fusion) and installed them all. Then I started Compiz Fusion by going to start menu->system->Compiz Fusion Icon and the effects are ready to be served.

I have found Compiz Fusion working very smoothly in both KDE and GNOME using these RPMs.

lately i have shifted to new location so is my machine. new location new net connection but the configuration process was different. previously I used connection with static IP but this time i have got to use dynamic IP assigned by DHCP. DHCP server identifies my PC using my MAC address. Up to this point I was fine but the problem was I could not use the physical address of my NIC rather I have to use the one provided by the connection provider. So i had to change the MAC address and this was the problem as I did not know how to change the MAC address in Linux. The technician come along, advised me that i would not be able to use this connection in Linux platform. This sounded real ridiculous. After doing little googling and skimming through ref book, I found the solution. The solution is not that difficult.

use ifconfig utility:

MAC address can be changed very easily using ifconfig.Before issuing command, be root user.Then issue the following command on the terminal:

#/sbin/ifconfig eth0 down hw ether address

here it is assumed that ifconfig is in the /sbin directory.

eth0 is the name of the interface/NIC which address is to be changed.

down means the NIC is to be shutdown before changing address.

hw ether means hardware address class is ether(which indicates ethernet).

address is the address which will used as the new mac.

After the successful execution of the command. start the NIC again using the command:

#/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

and that is all I needed.

some users allege that fedora users are beta testers for RedHat. but to me, it is a never-possible-before way of experiencing the cutting edge technology in this arena. fedora is comparatively stable and does not cause that severe problem to the users though RedHat do not provide any on-demand service for it. another allegation was about the lack of user friendly GUI tools to manage the system. it is good to see that linux variant of operating systems are getting more and more user friendly day by day. i am not a linux expert. but many a time i was asked by my friends how to play this, how to play that and bla bla bla.this time i am going to hint out some of the easiest how tos. unfortunately if internet connection is not available, this is of no use.

installing beryl:

beryl is a tool for experiencing eye candy in linux. it provides much more options than mac or vista. beryl depends on the 3d performance of the graphics hardware. but unfortunately open source graphics hardware driver cannot provide 3d support at this moment(though it will be available in a short time. its code name is ‘nouveau’). so we have to use nvidia or ati provided graphics driver. so fire up terminal and write:

#>yum install kmod-nvidia // for nvidia

#> yum install yum install xorg-x11-drv-fglrx kmod-fglrx glx-utils // for ati

wait for installation to finish. after completion write:

#> yum install beryl

after completion write the following in terminal to enable beryl:

#> beryl-manager

thats it and see what u r upto.

playing mp3, wma:

there are numerous mp3 players for linux but i prefer audacious. to install it issue the following command in the konsole:

#>yum install audacious audacious-plugins-nonfree-mp3 audacious-plugins-nonfree-wma

playing video and dvd disc:

looks like no one is better than vlc. so let it be. open the terminal and say:

#> yum install vlc

and it is done.