sudo ln -s /home/username/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s /home/username/.icons /root/.icons

Browsing a friends backblog I came across this great piece of news I’d somehow missed. The full story can be found here. Apparently Microsoft cares about alienating their customer base as much as Sprint does. GG indeed. American McGee is perhaps the most interesting game developer I know of. Also, I’ve always been fascinated at how dark classic fairy tales really are and he loves bringing that quality out in games. I’m looking forward to his new project, Grimm. Hopefully he’ll be making a Metacities or Beryl theme based on some of the artwork from his games (probably not ).

In any case, Microsoft’s extreme reactionary policy towards pirating seems to be having the same effect game companies suffered when they adopted Starforce. Pirates are going to pirate, and their technical knowhow will circumvent any sort of copy protection you can dream up which will cripple your less-knowledgeable, legitimate users (excuse the stereotype). For example, I had to use a cracking method in order to get my legitimately purchased copy of X3 to work at all. At the time it was using Starforce and regardless of whether or not Starforce fries drives (most likely does) it did completely prevent me from playing the game. Further research revealed that Starforce installs ring 0 drivers which can slow your system down and practices odd pr like threatening journalists who report problems, and making fake websites to toot their own horn (screenie just in case they change the domain info). Starforce was dropped from X3 in later releases and wasn’t in the game’s Steam release. Additionally, Ubisoft has dropped Starforce and other publishers have followed suit. So when is Microsoft going to drop the crap and actually cater to their legitimate users? How many of their legitimate users are going to pirate it instead, since it’s easier, or are going to switch to something else like American McGee has? I hope never. As far as I’m concerned, the more Microsoft shoots themselves in the foot the better off we all are. RIP M$.

At work I have a Dell Optiplex GX270 with an integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 chip. I installed Ubuntu and Beryl, but Beryl was giving me some trouble. Things were slow and the gradients were bad. I thought there was some graphical limitation that didn’t allow me to use certain window decorations, because pixmap-based stuff worked fine. I went back to Metacity and forgot about it for a while. Later I decided to rotate my display for text reading and tried Beryl again. After some troubleshooting I determined I needed a new driver (sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel). It broke rotation, but at the same time I discovered I’d been running in 16 bit color depth! I changed it to 24 bit and with the new driver Beryl looks amazing and runs smooth.

Note the choppy gradient in this before picture (how silly could I be?):

Now after the new driver and correct settings (also note the spiffy icons):

Much better. Wow, I hope I get inspired to post more interesting stuff soon.