Jeremy Visser

I just found out through a post on customising life that you can do compositing in Ubuntu Edgy with the open-source nv driver. Just install libxcomposite1 and xcompmgr, add the following to xorg.conf and you should be all set:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Next, just type in xcompmgr -c and you’ll get shadows. It’s a bit like Mac OS X, in that all the eye candy has software fallbacks. The compositing with the nv driver seems very stable. I can’t understand why they don’t have an easy option to turn in on. Ooh, hang on. xcompmgr ain’t all that stable. Nevermind, at least Xubuntu supports it properly.

I’ve known for sometime that the preferred abbreviation for Firefox is Fx. Just look at the FAQ. However, I’ve noticed that increasingly, FF is becoming the de facto abbreviation for Firefox, and that oddly annoys me. However, what annoys me even more is people that write FireFox. They need a spanking.

Ooh, and speaking of Firefox, version 2.0 has been released.

I just love this awesome blonde joke!

Finally, Internet Explorer 7 has been released. As the first major update to Internet Explorer in five years, this is a most welcome update.

I guess I no longer have to make up excuses for not supporting Internet Explorer 6 in my website designs.

I’ve been customising the Ubuntu 6.06.1 Desktop CD according to this guide on the Ubuntu Wiki. I previously wrote about the Ubuntu Customization Kit, a graphical tool to do the job. Unfortunately, all it lets you do is customise the packages installed on the CD and then it builds the ISO for you. It does not give you the opportunity to customise anything else.

That’s why I wanted to do it by hand. It’s turned out really cool. On my customised CD, I have defaulted it to the Clearlooks theme with a wallpaper by gtnconcept. Additionally, I have enabled FreeType autohinting, applied the Turner font patches, enabled subpixel rendering by default, added the Luxi font family, and added the NVIDIA drivers.

It all works beautifully, except for the NVIDIA drivers. Well, they work, but you’ve got to edit xorg.conf manually after booting into the live environment. By the way, the integrating spellchecking in Firefox 2.0 RC2 is cool.

Every time the Live CD boots, it runs casper scripts contained in the initrd.gz file. You can edit the scripts by chroot’ing into the unzipped squashfs and editing the files in the /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom directory. Then, you rebuild the initrd.gz. I haven’t figured out how to get the casper-reconfigure run by the scripts to use the NVIDIA driver if a GeForce card is present.