Enabling Compiz on the Aspire One

So, you now have the ability to do what you please with Linpus, you’ve seen those videos of people turning linux desktops into a cube, having wobbly windows, and much more…

 

Compiz actually runs quite nice on the One, although there are some problems with streaming video (well, any video actually), it lags, but I think that’s just a driver problem.

 

Anyway it’s simple to activate, yep, not install, but activate. Since Linpus is based of Fedora 8, it’s actually intergrated into the operating system itself, just not turned on. The only thing you have to do is install one app and you’re set. This app is called “Fusion-Icon”.

 

The first step to doing this is to open up terminal either via right click or ALT+F2. After this, type in the following “sudo -y yum install fusion-icon”, for those who don’t know, Yum is the installation program that is used in RPM based system, it’s no the best, but it works. The -y parameter is just saying “Say yes to everything”, I would suggest you use this if you know what you’re installing!

 

After this is done, just launch Fusion-Icon via Alt+F2, it’ll activate compiz and you’ll be spinning the desktop in no time.

 

Oh, and if you want more themes for Emerald (the window decorator), in terminal just type “sudo yum install emerald-themes”, this will get you a nice amount of themes to choose from, I recommend Minimal for a great space saver, there’s is a thinner title bar theme, but I found it a tad to small for me.

 

Thing is though, due to the lack of access to the session manager, at least to my knowledge (I don’t usually use this environment, if you can access a session manager, please email me with the details and I’ll update the guide, or make a comment of course! ) you can’t easily launch Fusion-Icon on each startup, which if you’re like me that really annoys you, >.<.

 

The best thing to do is knock out 2 birds with one stone, that is, killing the startup of the desktop search bar and also allowing Fusion-Icon to start upon, well, startup.

 

The key to this is in the launch script for acer-search-desktop itself, which is located in “/usr/share/search-bar/start-search_bar.sh”. This file looks like this on default.

 

 

#!/bin/sh

#resolution=`xrandr |grep \*|awk ‘{print $1}’`

resolution=`xrandr |grep current|awk -F”current” ‘{print $2}’|awk -F”,” ‘{print $1}’|sed ’s/\ //g’`

 

if [ $resolution = "1280x800" ];then

acer-search-desktop –x=650 –y=90 –width=490 –height=31

elif [ $resolution = "1024x600" ];then

acer-search-desktop –x=510 –y=65 –width=490 –height=31

else

acer-search-desktop

fi

 

 

Now, to take out the booting of the search bar, simply comment the lines that have “acer-search-desktop”, then after doing that, before the if statement asking for resolution size add “fusion-icon”.

 

#!/bin/sh

#resolution=`xrandr |grep \*|awk ‘{print $1}’`

resolution=`xrandr |grep current|awk -F”current” ‘{print $2}’|awk -F”,” ‘{print $1}’|sed ’s/\ //g’`

 

fusion-icon

 

if [ $resolution = "1280x800" ];then

# acer-search-desktop –x=650 –y=90 –width=490 –height=31

elif [ $resolution = "1024x600" ];then

# acer-search-desktop –x=510 –y=65 –width=490 –height=31

else

# acer-search-desktop

fi

 

 

Remember though, keep an empty line at the end of the file!

 

And that’s it, you’re done, you’ve taken out the booting of the pesky desktop search bar as well as booting compiz, give yourself a pat on the back, .

 

 

 

Thanks for reading, remember to comment, oh, and as usual, don’t forget to email any ideas for posts, may it be Digg posts, hot topics, or just ideas for how-to guides to my email address: ghostinterface@gmail.com.

We’re back!

First off, I’m sorry I more or less let this blog die, it was a horrible thing to do, although while moving over information to an actual server, my grid died, which took a while.

Anyway, we moved over to WordPress as well as changed our name, I give you Heretic Studios!

Let the information sharing continue! I hope you guys enjoy the content, oh and don’t forget to tell your friends about us here at Heretic Studios, .

Since it is that time of year, everyone is getting ready to back to a long year of school, netbooks are a big craze, so I figured I’d put out a guide on how to make one in particular, the Acer Aspire One a bit more useful!

First off, I know there are a lot of guides on how to enable system access, but I think this guide is going to be a lot easier/faster than other guides, if not just by a few steps, .

I’m hoping guide will be the cleanest and as simple as possible while teaching some common use linux commands that you will be using in the future when using the device. A few of these commands are trivial, but in my opinion are critical in having a smooth quick experience.

So, the first step to setting up the desktop right click behavior is to actually show the XFCE control center, this can be done simply through how we’re going to launch the terminal, but in order to save time, lets just launch it through Terminal, this is because we’re going to have to set a root password through terminal as well.

While holding ALT press F2, this will bring up an application run dialog, type in “terminal”, then hit run or enter.

One terminal is open (don’t be afraid, trust me, this is your best friend in linux, and if you’re experienced enough, you can perform tasks much faster through terminal than the standard desktop interface, as well as the XFCE linpus modded desktop) type “sudo passwd”, then after this put in a password that you want to be used with root; this is needed especially if you plan on using the application installer gui within the system.

After this, type in “xfce-settings-show” and press enter, the settings dialog will show up. Click Desktop options, then the Behavior tab, lastly Check the Right Click behavior, this will allow you to run applications downloaded as well as provide simple access to the settings and much more.

And that’s it really, you can now run the Add/Remove application program or install from terminal through yum (I’m really a fan of Debian based systems myself, but at the price of boot time on the One, the best thing to do is stick to Linpus…but you can still have some fun…).

Thanks for reading, feel free to comment, and don’t forget to send suggestions for future posts to me at: ghostinterface@gmail.com!