Saturday, December 30, 2006

XGL + Compwiz = WOW

I have been fooling around with some new Linux distros lately. Namely Open Suse 10.2 and Mandriva 2007. Both ship with the ability to run XGL and I have to say it's very cool. I will attempt to post a picture of it in action but if you want to see the real deal go to Youtube or Google Video's and type in XGL and watch a demo. I have been having a ball with all the effects but I also believe that this can be a productivity tool as well. Having four desktops available to you and being able to use them with little effort is a time saver. I tried Mandriva 2007 Power Pack first and was delighted to have a painless install and when it came time to finish my setup it asked me if I wanted to install a propietory driver for my video card (Nvidia 5200) I clicked yes and off it went to find download and setup my card with Nvidia drivers. Wow that was easy! After my first boot into the OS a quick look around the menus brought me to a "enable desktop effects" button. One click later XGL was running on my old hardware. I spent a day checking it out then did the Open Suse install. It was a smooth process also but installing the Nvidia drivers took a lot more work. But I prevailed and then enabling the desktop effects was a one click affair. Both OS's are very nice but I think the nod goes to Open Suse for it's clean look and sharp clean fonts. Don't get me wrong Mandriva is very nice also. I will spend some time with these two and let you know how it goes

No comments: