Few days ago, I finally got a chance to stretch abit & test some bits of Mandriva that I did not have the spare equipment to do so. Many thanks to THEwe for selling me cheap a slightly gawky looking clone PC. (As I thought, I couldn't get used to the glowy blue LEDs in the transparent side cover :p)
Anyhow I'm typing this now using my new 'to me' pc, attached to a horrible looking 14' CRT monitor. While still waiting for my 20' flat panel. As you'd expect, I have it running Mandriva Free 2007.
A few days ago I got adventurous & decided to try out some things I've not tested before & also try some stuff in the backports repositories. (just to see what I could break)
But to my suprise, I didn't manage to break anything.. yet.
1. I installed SCIM & SKIM. to get Chinese input support. The installation went well, but I couldn't figure out what to do afterwards. I couldn't find a whole lot of help either. Some fonts were showing up as little square boxes. I figured out later that I needed to install locale-zh & font-ttf-chinese. After that, It all seemed to only work in GNOME apps & not in KDE. I later figured out that I needed to change my input method by running 'draklocale'. Finally it all worked & suprisingly well.
2. Next up I upgraded to the latest 9xxx series NVIDIA modules. I decided to play it safe & used the updated ones in plf. (Added the repositories plf-free_updates & plf-nonfree_updates) Did it, restarted & I could now use AIGLX instead of XGL for compiz, no hacks, just using drak3d.
3. Finally I got really excited & decided to go for Beryl. I added the main_backports & contrib_backports repositories. Searched for beryl, install beryl-core, beryl-manager & emerald. Disabled 3D Desktop in MCC, restarted X & ran 'beryl-manager'. It just worked immediately.. & it looked absolutely stunning. to make beryl start everytime, do '$ cd ~/.kde/Autostart' then '$ ln -s /usr/bin/beryl-manager beryl-start'. That's it.
I've been using the system like this for a few days & so far it has survived every situation I threw at it. Someone told me that Beryl is highly experimental & incredibly buggy & unstable. Well not in my experience. I found that Beryl IS ACTUALLY STABLE & fully usable for the everyday desktop. I won't bother posting any video of Beryl on my desktop, there are already tons of these on YouTube. Go have a look if you don't know what I'm talking about.
1 last thing. I forget to mention flash-player in my previous post about setting up a Mandriva box. Well, if you haven't figured it out: Goto 'http://sdc.shockwave.com/go/gntray_dl_getflashplayer' download the RPM version. install with '# urpmi flash-plugin*.rpm'
Till next time..
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