After a little pause for breath, here is part 4 of the Compiz series, focussing on the compiz config manager. You should by now have a working webbook with a few slightly fancy effects, switching between desktops will now slide the screen across and the menus fade in and out. You can also change the screen resolution to 1024×768 and have it compress onto the webbook native 1024×600 screen.
There are loads and loads of different settings you can mess with if you install the compiz configuration manager. Start the Synaptic package manager (System-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager) and install compizconfig-settings-manager. Once installed this will be in System-Preferences-CompizConfig Settings Manager.
I will tell you which settings I like, but don’t be afraid to play with others and leave a comment about ones you like/dislike.
- Right down the bottom of the list is the Move Window setting (you can only see this running at 1024×768, you can just about click on it at1024×600). In this section untick the “Constrain Y” checkbox. This allows you to alt-drag windows off the top of the screen which is rather important when running at 1024×600.
- In General Options (at the top) click the Desktop Size tab and change the Horizontal Vertical Size to 4. This is the number of sides of the cube (you can have 3 to make it a triangle or whatever shape you like really)
- Enable Rotate Cube, this will enable Desktop Cube and turn off Desktop Wall (the sliding between desktops thing) Go into the Rotate Cube options and change the zoom slider to about 0.5, this zooms out a bit when the cube is rotating.
- Enable Shift Switcher
- There are fun things to play with in Animations and you can turn on or off wobbly windows to suit your taste.
Magic keystrokes:
- Hold Ctrl+Alt then Click and drag to rotate the cube.
- Ctrl+Alt+ left, right or down cursor moves the cube about from the keyboard
- Windows+e to zoom out and see your desktops on a wall (you can drag applications about when zoomed out)
- Windows+Tab to flick through windows in the shift-switcher
Glad to see you back, Alan.
I have implemented your suggestions successfully, and it all works. The only thing remaining is to decide whether the effect achieved is useful and not just irritating…
Could you remind me how alt-drag works – I don’t seem to be able to get it to do anything. What precisely should I be attempting? Hold Alt key, click and hold on title bar, then… what? Seem to be no further forward.
On another matter, I wonder if you would consider setting up a forum on this website, using one of the php apps for this sort of thing, so we could ask each other questions and provide peer support. So you don’t have everybody waiting for you to solve their pet problem*. What do you think?
Will
*Which in my case is wanting to turn off touchpad clicks. Just in case you were interested.
@Will, alt-drag allows you to drag from any point on the window, not just the title bar. That means you can hold the window by the bottom and push the title bar off the top of the screen. A forum is planned fairly soon.
Thanks, Alan, got it.
Hi Alan,
I have a mobile internet connection and wonder if there is any way of enabling Internet connection sharing on ubuntu so that my other pc’s can access it and browse the net.I have a router and xp and vista see each other but on the other hand ubuntu does see them two but not itself on the network..Is there any way of having ICS from a ubuntu o/s? Thanks..
@Heemank, funny you should ask, I set this exact scenario up just yesterday. We (The Open Learning Centre)are exhibiting on Thursday at the Woking Means Business show and I wanted internet access for all the laptops on the stand via a webbook. The webbook has the mobile broadband connection and is connected to a wireless router, the other computers use the webbook as the gateway.
To get it working there are a couple of magical incantations required on the webbook, specifically,
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1to allow it to forward packets from the wireless interface to the mobile broadband interface, and then
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o hso0 -j MASQUERADEto set up a firewall rule to do network address translation (NAT) for the 192.168.0.0 subnet (the local network) with the external interface being called hso0 (if you have the Orange dongle the network card is called hso0, if it is 3 or T Mobile then substitute hso0 for ppp0)
Whilst I remember, there is a bit of a trick that needs doing on the other client PCs too, you need to point their DNS servers at the Orange DNS (158.43.192.1) and set their default gateway to be the internal IP address of your webbook. The router is normally your DHCP server and because it is a bit confused about not being the actual gateway to the internet you have to override some of the settings it hands out.
Alan, just had to add a comment. I received my Webbook yesterday, could only get the XP vers as my local CPW said they were no longer supplying Linux versions, (they then went on to say that XP was so much better !) and I couldn’t find the Linux vers on the CPW website.
So, anyhows, installed 8-04 via external DVD, and installed the Three 3G dongle – expecting bit of a nightmare, but no, works straight-away. Went to bed feeling very happy !
Onto today, installed the new VIA drivers and setup compiz – went totally smoothly.
So, onto the point why I had to post, all of the above would not be possible without the effort yourself and others have put in. It REALLY is appreciated.
I just cant believe how fantastic that little box is !
Again, thank you very much,
Regards,
Tim
Is anyone else having a problem with the fast user switching? If I have the VIA drivers enabled, trying to switch users from the top status bar just locks the machine up – but it works fine (obviously with no compiz) if you have openchrome loaded.
Hi Alan.. I have tried to mess around with it but I had no luck so far…A bit of help would be greatly appreciated..On the router set up screen there is a page which ask about the internet connection settings which ask for internet ip address , subnet mask, default gateway, static DNS1,Static dns2 and dns3. So which setting would you say?
@heeman, don’t worry too much about the settings on the router, we are only going to be using it as a hub (and possibly DHCP server) changing DNS1 to point to the Orange DNS wouldn’t be a bad thing to do, and if it lets you set the webbook internal IP address as the default gateway then that would be great. More important to set the default gateway on the other computers on your LAN to point to the gateway. Try using traceroute to an IP address on the outside and see if it goes to the webbook and beyond. If that works then try to ping something by name rather than IP address.