Beryl-Themes.org   Lots of good stuff here.

After getting used to Beryl at home, I truly HATE working on my XP desktop when I’m in the office. I’ve spent quite a while working with classic asp, and am working more and more in .net, but I would likely drop it all for open source languages if I could set up my own rig at work.

My current work desktop has dual processors and dual monitors, but now it feels like I’m playing old school Atari when I have a next gen box at home. It is plenty fast…I just miss all all the niceties I’ve gotten used to with Beryl and KDE.

LinuxMCE returns - Download Squad

LinuxMCE sounds promising. When I tried to get MythTV installed on Fedora (core 4 or 5, i don’t recall) I spent most of my time fighting to get hardware recognized and working… I finally got everything working after a few weeks just to wipe it clean and install win XP so I could play iNinja. I haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, even though that is the current hot distro. I may end up giving it a shot, but most likely I will try Fedora Core 6 with MythTV so my media pc and desktop can use the same repositories. Of course, I would be better off with a Win MCE installation or virtual machine so I can stream to my 360.

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Mono Project

Now you can write AND run .net code on pretty much anything, for free. With Mono’s newest release, you can use Visual Basic. I’m not sure why you would want to, but you can if you feel the urge.

Quick Reference Bash

Heres a handy little list of common bash commands. It is by no means exhaustive, but it is a good link to have if you are new to finding your way around the linux command line.

Its been over a week now, and I can’t say I have missed windows at all. I started out with gnome as it installs by default, even though I’ve always preferred KDE. After a few days, I installed KDE too. I remembered instantly why I like it so much.

KDE just seems so much more “grown up” to me. Administration is a snap, and everything is right there ready to go. I also prefer a single panel, as opposed to the top and bottom panels of gnome.

I’ve tried Looking Glass, a java windows manager, but its still a bit sluggish for my taste. I have a decent machine, plenty of horsepower, but lg3d was still a little slow. Next up, I plan to give Beryl a shot. The features list is sick.

I ran into some issues with Windows Firewall (which I disabled) last night, so I trashed windows and installed Fedora Core 6. It took about an hour to get the whole thing installed (including openoffice and more development tools than I know how to use). About 15 minutes later, my browser was good to go with all the needed media plugins, and I’m back up and running.

I’ll still be using win for development at work, unless I end up taking the Java route. If that happens, I’ll request a nix rig or maybe a mac for development. Of course, streaming content to my xbox and most pc games will require a windows installation, but I can just use virtual machines for that.

Last night, I had about enough of my pc telling me what I HAD to have installed and running. Now, I’ll be the one telling my pc what it has to have…even if that means a week of downtime here and there while I figure out what the hell I did to fry my linux installation.