Compiz on Debian Etch

After a year of researching Metisse and drooling at Compiz and Beryl videos on Youtube. I've finally got Compiz Fusion for KDE working on my trusty Dell Inspiron 510m. Yes, its 4 years old and only has 512MB of ram. But, it works great! Not only that, but I also managed to install it on my colleague Caleb's IBM Thinkpad X60. A first time installing Linux on an IBM machine. It was really smooth.

Compiz installs easily and works out of the box. Just add the repo below, update and select the compiz-fusion-kde package.

• http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-etch/desktopfx/stable/ ./

If you use synaptic to install you can also pull in emerald and other compiz packages that are appropriate. Use your brains and read the descriptions to decide which ones.

By the way, has anyone out there tried virtualbox or xen on an IBM Thinkpad X60? That's next on the to do list. Any suggestions or help would be great!

Asus eee pc

I had a chance to play with the eee pc last week. Thanks very much to my colleague Rosalind.

Its a really neat device. The touchpad button is really stiff so its hard to use it comfortably but other than that, its great!. No complaints at all and hey, Its Linux!

It could do with some fine tuning to reduce the space taken up. I wouldn't use it as a workhorse so OpenOffice is a bit overkill. Better to replace it with Gnumeric and Abiword.

One really useful feature is that it allows a factory reset just by pressing F9 when rebooting. Everything is restored to its original setting from the hidden partition. This makes the device a prime device for testing software packages and maybe even installing other OSes.

Now if we could only get access to that hidden partition.... what wonders that would hold.

By the way, did I mention that I'm the first in company to recover a crashed eee pc? Yay!