Daily Archive for December 17th, 2006

Beryl on Debian Etch

Published
by
Anton
on December 17, 2006
in Debian
. 0 Comments

I spent today playing with Beryl and getting it running on Debian Etch. Beryl is a fork from Compiz and similar to XGL, and if you do not know what is is, have a look on google video or wikipedia. It is visually stunning, and while not completely stable I have not had any problems with it so long as I kept the blur and focustrail plugins turned off.

Setting it up was actually very easy. The Beryl wiki has a nice Debian install page, but to sum it up I had to add a new apt sources entry, install a few packages, edit my xorg config file, restart X and then just run it!

This is the kind of thing that will make every windows user say “What are you running? Where can I get that?”

If you are running linux I would definitely suggest you install it and give it a go. It runs as a window manager, and can be simply run manually so that you don’t have to have it on all the time (it is so new I would not call it stable, but it seems pretty reliable to me).

The transparency of a playing movie is incredible, not to mention all the other wonderful effects.

OpenOffice across NFS

Published
by
Anton
on December 17, 2006
in Debian
. 1 Comment

I used to use samba for sharing files on my home network (most of my data is on a “server”) but it seemed to have nasty problems with wireless. It turns out NFS copes far better and allows mp3’s to stream nicely, so I fixed my IP address and got that setup (pretty easy actually).

The only problem I have found so far is that by default OpenOffice.org does not like to edit files across NFS as it wants to be able to lock files. I am not sure if you can allow file locking across NFS or not, but I found a workaround for OpenOffice, and I am not going to have a problem editing the same file from two places anyway.

Simply edit /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice (or /opt/openoffice2/program/soffice on non-debian distros) and comment out the lines

# file locking now enabled by default
SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1
export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING

and you can now open documents across NFS in write mode!