I was able to leave work early today, I LOVE when that happens.. I took care of some personal responsibilities and came home to beer and some time with my desktop. I haven’t had a lot of time to really play since I installed Edgy.
Beryl:
I gotta say, the Beryl project is extremely cool. I had a great time picking out a skydome wallpaper and just tweaking out the desktop effects. I had to kill off the trailfocus plugin in beryl, I was getting annoyed with the fading out of apps. Other than that, I couldn’t be happier with the software. It’s just amazing. I have a nice fresh looking desktop with fun effects that just may help convince a few others to give Linux a shot (you KNOW anyone coming into this abode will be visiting my machine). Yeah, yeah, eye candy isn’t the reason to switch operating systems. That doesn’t mean that it won’t have an impact on some of those who are more reluctant to make the change. Who knows?
On the topic of Beryl, it seems that the folks over at Fedora are creating packages for it. That’s excellent news! I’ve noticed that Beryl core and Beryl devel have made it into the repos. I’m hoping that they’re planning to create packages for the plugins and extra toys as well.
*Note: if you followed the instructions for installing Beryl 0.1.1 in this post, and you update to the latest version in the Fedora repos, you WILL break Beryl. The good news is that it’s easy to fix. The RPMs referenced in the post have been updated to v 0.1.2. You can just download and install all of the packages except for core and devel (the post explains how if you don’t know what I’m talking about). After that, Beryl will be back, and up-to-date. Be sure to play with the “burn” animation. It looks NICE, but IMO it gets too annoying to use regularly. I wouldn’t mind seeing a “smoke” animation. Something that turns into wisps of smoke when you close an app could be pretty sexy 
VMware:
I took some time today to set up some test VMware appliances for LinuxWorldNet. I’ll be using these “machines” to explore software and record my steps so I can post some how-to’s here. I’ve mostly completed the Fedora install, I’ll be working on Edgy shortly and I’ve created a Debian stable server for testing.
Upcoming Things:
I’ll be using the Debian VM to test out some FTP servers for Linux. I currently use Gene6 for Windows and would like to make the move to one of my Linux machines. I have no idea how well this will work out, I’ll post about my ups and downs here. Its going to be tough for any FTP server to beat G6, that’s just an amazing app. As I get into it, I’ll tell you what my requirements are and we’ll see how far I can get
I also plan on covering the configuration of OpenSSH server for both Fedora and Ubuntu. I’ll explain how to set them up in the most paranoid way I know how. I’m hoping that any newbies stumbling upon this blog will be able to open his/her SSH server to the evils of the Internet and still feel confident that they will be as safe as can possibly be.
That’s pretty much it for now. The only other thing I’d like to put out there is this; I’d like to hear from anyone that checks this blog out and has a few minutes to fire off a comment or email (matt at linuxworldnet dot com). Let me know what you think or if there’s a topic you’d like covered (I’ll do what I can, I’m still new to this Linux thing myself).
I need to get back to my beer and play, laydah!
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