Ubuntu Eye Candy: Desktop Effects

So this is a tutorial about how to install some nifty desktop effects in ubuntu. Now under Preferences on the Menu there’s a tab for Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. In order to get this you need to install Compiz Manager. So open up a terminal window, and enter the following:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Once that’s been installed you can access the CompizConfig Settings Manager. You can go through and check off a bunch of different ones to give you some nifty eye candy.

Ubuntu Settings

When you go into one of the settings there will be a plethora of tabs for you to tweek the effects to the millimeter of how you want them to behave.

Effects Settings

CompizConfig Settings are an easy and quick way to install the Desktop Cube, Desktop wall, and the Expo which is identical to the Expo in Mac OS X.

Expo

There are also a plethora of effects for you to install.

Visual Effects

Hopefully this post is fairly helpful, it’s more indepth than most of the videos that I throw up on here, and I hope that everyone enjoys it.

Ubuntu Cube On Mac OS X

Lately it seems like a ton of my OS X running friends have been content with the new spaces visual effect that Leopard supplies. This is until I show them what a properly set up Ubuntu machine (and most other linux distros) can really do. Now I know that this isn’t a complete fix and it certainly isn’t as extensible as the visual effects that you can have installed on your linux box, but this is a quick fix for you OS X machine. The Service is called VirtueDesktops. Virtue Desktops is a free service that installs more visual effects on your machine. As seen in this video one of them is something very similar to the linux cubes.

I’ll try to upload a better video when I get home.

How To Install Ubuntu Cube

In the vein of ultimate things that Ubuntu can do I’ve decided to show you these 2 videos, the first is more Eye Candy showing off the ultimate power of Ubuntu, the second is a short video about how to get a cube desktop working on your own Ubuntu Machine.

Aurora and the Future of Paleo Future

So I took a moment today during my night class to take a peak at Adaptive Path & Mozilla’s video about their browser of the future called Aurora. The video is very interesting showing us briefly a glimpse at what tomorrow may be bringing us in terms of technology of tomorrow. Of course the key phrase there is “may be bringing”, now don’t get me wrong this video isn’t just fodder for an angry me in 10 years demanding the world that the video presented us, instead I’m an active acceptor of ideas of what the world will be in the future. The home of tomorrow at Disneyland is one of my favorite things as well as the blog Paleo Future is one of my favorite blogs to read. Anyways, this video seems to be something that we’ll be fondly looking at in the future. Case in point this example of Apple’s Time Capsule shot in 1997, but that’s just one example, there’s a plethora of others out there floating around in the paleo future world, some that are multi staged productions much like the Aurora videos.

Taking a more critical look at the Aurora there are certain things that will not doubt age the video as time goes on. One thing is the small frame from a South Park episode that can be seen on the screen repeatedly, no doubt in 10 years people will still be watching South Park but I seem to think that will begin to show the videos age as time goes on. Another thing is the “mouse” that the character uses to navigate this extremely complex computer system, indeed it’s not a mouse at all or at least in our conventional terms, it really isn’t the subject of the video so they don’t give it much screen time but it both confuses and fascinates me. the idea of a more physical navigation through a terminal seems very interesting but the inclusion of a standard keyboard I’m confused as to why a more practical led style key board seen in Iron Man isn’t shown in the video. The third object which is probably the most unrealistic, at least looking at where technology is today and where it is going, is the small credit card style video player, this is most obviously a conceptualization of the next iphone/ipod or at least the next one down the line. What makes me skeptical is this idea of the Internet being at the palm of your hands at all times. This may be the only thing that I’m cynical about, case in point I’ve been living in San Francisco for a while now and we had been promised city wide wifi for a long time… Of course nothing ever happened. Google, who was in cohorts with Earth Link to set this up has managed to get rid of plastic bags, and give the homeless a voice mail  account but have failed to spear head a city wide wifi. Now in the future Wi Max may be readily available or a 3G network that is much broader than the current one, but at the rate we’re going we will have personal devices that are capable of doing things far greater than what our Internet will allow them to do.