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Compiz Fusion Sphere

Compiz Fusion Cylinder

Read this article to install Compiz Fusion and get this plug in.

For those who like to have Mac OSX Dock style, here is the list of dock (according to my preference) which you can choose from.

• Avant Window Navigator

• Cairo-Dock

• Kiba Dock

With one of these docks, you can get similar effect as the Mac OSX Dock for your Ubuntu. To get this three dock working on your Ubuntu, your computer must be able to support composition. You must also have a composite manager such as Compiz-Fusion and Beryl installed in your Ubuntu.

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Inspired by two popular Mac applications; Spotlight and Quicksilver, David Siegel has developed GNOME Do as a part of his university course which afterward became a popular application for Linux.

With GNOME Do, you can quickly launch an application just by typing the application’s name. It’s not just restricted to applications. You also can search and open webpage, Firefox bookmarks, files, album in Rhythmbox and etc. Everything is just on your finger tips. Type the things you one in GNOME Do and launch it. You can extend the functionality of GNOME Do by installing extra plugins such as Banshee, Pidgin, Google Calculator and Tomboy.

Install GNOME Do in Ubuntu 8.04:

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About two weeks after the release of the first beta version, here comes Banshee 1.0 Beta 2. Same as before,three new features has been added in this released and over 28 bugs have been fixed since beta 1.

New Features:

Podcast Support
With Banshee 1.0 Beta 2, you can subscribe to your favorite audio and video podcasts, and search and browse your podcasts the same way you do your Music Library.Banshee will stream the audio or video so you don’t have to wait for it to download first.

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About a week ago, Fedora 9, codename Sulphur was released to the public. Fedora 9 comes with a lot of new features and updated softwares such as the latest Gnome 2.22, KDE 4.0.3, Xfce 4.4.2, Mozilla Firefox Beta 5, Open Office 2.4 and a 2.6.25 based kernel. Here are some of reviews about Fedora 9 that I have found over the internet.

Linux.com conclude that:

Aside from the problems with PackageKit — and, to a lesser extent, the inclusion of KDE 4.0.3 — Fedora 9 manages to balance innovation with a high degree of usability. Over the last few months, Fedora has been increasingly compared favorably with Ubuntu on both accounts, and, to a large extent, it deserves this praise. If anything, it has probably exceeded Ubuntu in innovation, with at least a dozen major new ideas in every release. It is a rare release, too, in which Fedora’s menus and dialog do not show minor tinkering to fine-tune the user experience.

Yet the problems in Fedora 9 emphasize how difficult a balance the Fedora project tries to maintain. The fact that improvements are coming for both KDE and PackageKit, and that, meanwhile, workarounds exist, is beside the point — these facts are lucky accidents, and nothing that Fedora has done.

Although Fedora’s innovations make it one of the more interesting distributions to use and watch these days, the project needs to temper its creativity with more consideration of how changes affect users. Perhaps these relatively minor problems will help the distribution correct its release policies before a major disaster happens in a future release.

Source: Fedora 9: Leading edge or bleeding edge?

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Ubuntu system doesn’t come with something like Mac OSX widgets or Windows Vista gadgets by default. However, you can get this feature by installing software called Screenlets.Screenlets are small applications written in python which can be put anywhere on your desktop. With the released of Screenlets 0.1.1, support for web widgets (widgets which are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, similar to Mac OSX widgetst) and Google Gadgets were added. With the widget plugin for Compiz Fusion, you can show and hide the Screenlets the same way you can with Mac OSX widgets. Screenlets include a bunch of preferences like keep above, keep below, lock a screenlet, make it sticky and set it as widget.

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