Matt

I use Gentoo for my desktop under Linux. I have attached some screen shots of my desktop for all of you to see. You can fix it up enough to where it will look better than Microsoft Vista that is soon to be thrown out to the public here quite soon. I’m running it on a simple IBM ThinkCentre. The processor is a Pentium 4, but other than that, there really isnt anything spectacular about the system itself. It only has 512MB of ram, and no 3D card. OpenGL works on it, but not amazingly fast. The point is that it does work, and you can have a pretty nice looking desktop setup rather than just a plain 2D workstation. The best part of it is that it requires very little setup on the user side to get this running. I tried XGL a while back but had several problems with it. To be honest, the only problem that I currently have now is the windower at the bottom which shows all 4 screens rather than one. And I don’t have 4 screens per side (of the cube) only one. The other problem is, leaving the computer running all night seems to lockup the system in the morning. I haven’t really figured out why it does that though. Turning the system on and off will fix it, but its a terrible solution to the problem. If you are running Gentoo Linux just follow the simple guide here on what to do to get it to run properly. http://wiki.gentoo-xeffects.org/Main_Page The wiki will tell you all that you need to do to get it running properly and in less than 30 minutes. After it’s all installed you also get a slew of options for the window manager and everything else. You can even have transparent window frames like they stuck into Vista as well. If you are not running Gentoo but would like to give it a try, please take a look at the official website here at http://www.gentoo.org. They have lots of good guides on how to start using it and get it installed into your system quite quickly. Be warned though that this isn’t the easiest install in the world. Nor is it that technically challenging too, but some technical knowhow would be better than none to get through all the installs. It might be a bit easier now, with the graphical install, but it didn’t work for me properly when I tried it, so I usually still stick with the command-line prompt install. I hope to see more advancements out there soon for this.

It seems that Microsoft has also decided to make their own version of Google Earth, with the added effect of being able to navigate around at street level. You can find a demo of their site here at http://preview.local.live.com/. Currently there are only two locations that can be seen now and those are Seattle, WA and San Francisco, CA. I wonder how privacy issues play into with this since well, they would need to fuzzy out all sorts of things. Apparently, Microsoft is having people drive around all over the US (next the world?) with cars strapped to the brim with cameras to give you the 180 degree views that you can see on the webpage. A very large venture for anyone, but I suppose if anyone does it, it would be a company that can afford such a venture. Anyways, just have to wait and see what they do with this.