bzugodesign.com | Hugo Velez

Following the previous post, I decided to write the following review on the current state of the desktop technologies provided by the major OS providers.

Everything in the tech world revolves around trends. The latest one is “Accelerated Desktops”. Apple was the first company to understand the importance users gave to the way their Desktop’s looked. To satisfy the desktop beauty enthusiasts, they introduced the dock from which the users control their applications and also many other effects such as the genie effect (seen when a window is minimized).
Following the trend set by Apple, Microsoft also started working on it’s Aero engine which now powers Windows Vista and all it’s bells and whistles. XP’s sucessor is filled up with transparencies, shiny menus, blur effects and glass-like icons.

But the greatest surprise didn’t come from any of the two above mentioned companies. The biggest “boom” in desktop acceleration came from the OpenSource world. I’m talking about the new Linux Accelerated Desktops. A year ago, a man named Davied Reveman who works for Novell presented the OpenSource community with two new major technologies: Xgl and Compiz. Xgl provided a layer on top of which Compiz could run and Compiz provided all the effects you could wish for, and many more. I owe Compiz the final motivation that made me look at Linux seriously. In one year, impressive work has been done on this new technology and, at this point, there is no rival for Compiz or Beryl (compiz’s fork).
My personal choice in the last couple of months has been Beryl. Beryl is a derivation of Compiz code which focus on fast development rather than stable development. It fits me better; I like to be on the bleeding edge. All this development has only been possible because of the increasing commitment from companies such as Nvidia who now provide support through their drivers for these new kind of applications.
Beryl provides the user with all kinds of effects but, most importantly, it actively makes work more productive. In my opinion, this is the decisive difference between Windows Vista Aero and Beryl. While most of Windows’s effects do nothing to enhance the way the user works, beryl achieves that with plugins such as “wpicker”/”scale”, “transparent windows” and “cube”. If you want to take a loot at a few examples, click here.

As you can see, competition in this area is fierce. Hopefully that’ll mean the user will see improvements much faster and that the overall desktop experience will rapidly become a lot more productive and pleasant.

– Luís Costa

Corrected the Team password, and changed the code a little bit.
Same link as beta: linux download.

This is an excellent idea for a new interface, they called it BumpTop. I like it but somethings need to be worked. I don’t like the idea of doing all of that with the mouse.

This version pretends to solve the remaining problems with 1.2, and ad some new things.

Added a new security fix for q3 engine.
Solved the remaining problems with string management.
Teams now wont be locked if one of the teams is empty.
Removed g_allowMapVote, g_allowMiscVote, g_allowGametypeVote, g_allowKickVote and replaced those with the existent cvar g_allowVote(default: g_allowVote 255), now with bitcode allowance.
Bitcode list:

map_restart - 1
nextmap - 2
map - 4
g_gametype - 8
kick - 16
g_dowarmup - 32
timelimit - 64
fraglimit - 128

Any doubt related to this, please ask.
Fixed some issues with checkready function, to check for ready players.
Finally added the melee as a weapon, add g_weapondisable 4 to disable it.
Replaced compilation Flags for optimization.

Still to fix bugs related to team password, some claim that 6 character is too big, and in some systems sometimes they get strange characters, all related to bad pointer reference maybe.

You can get the Linux beta: here.

OMG! It was what I said about the solution.

The problem:
Firefox automatic downloaded a new version and asked for restart.
Restarted and then I get:

Software Update Failed
One or more files could not be updated. Please make sure all other applications are closed and that you have permission to modify files, and then restart Firefox to try again.

Weird but after a lot of search and a few tries to change file permissions and other things around it , I discovered that YzDock was blocking somehow the update installation.

The Solution:
YzDock options -> Quit.

Open firefox, the update installation is done and voi?la…done.

Edit: This affects both firefox and thunderbird.