KODA

Sorry things have been pretty quiet here for the past day or so… I’ve been busy writing papers and other fun school-related stuff.

Well, I do have one announcement, and that is that I’ve finally found a PHP gallery app that fit my criteria, and that app is the excellent ZenPhoto. It’s just complex enough for my tastes, while being lightweight and having some neat ajaxy admin features. Not much to show yet, though it’s looking very good. I’m busy theming and tweaking things to fit the dark look of chromakode.com, though there are a few buggy things going on in the CSS that I haven’t figured out yet. Here’s a little preview, if you’d like to see what I’m talking about. There’s some old pictures up there for testing, though other than that it’s pretty bare. I’d love to hear any comments on the design, though (bugs aside).

A while ago, I wrote a howto, “Compiz, XGL on Ubuntu for the morbidly lazy,” about installing Compiz on a standard Ubuntu Dapper setup. This worked great for the packaged 0.0.2 version in the Dapper repositories, but while Ubuntu started freezing and preparing for their release, Compiz development blazed ahead and many beautiful new features and improvements came with it. Because of this, I switched over to the cvs version of Compiz and ran it for a long time. Unfortunately, my love of the bleeding-edge caught up to me, as about a month ago it seems that Ubuntu’s also not-updated version of Xgl and the Mesa libraries fell out of compatibility with cvs Compiz.

After several unsuccessful attempts to revert to an older version, I resigned back to normal Metacity until I had the time to look deeper into the problem and find what changes were needed. Long story short, after coming back to it today, I stumbled upon the excellent compiz.net forums, and subsequently RacerII’s howto. RacerII points to another forum member reggaemanu’s (mostly undocumented) repository over at xgl.compiz.info, which contains patched Xgl and Mesa packages. I tried them out today, and they work like a charm!