Author Topic: Post Your Desktop  (Read 5555 times)

Radical_Dreamer

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #45 on: June 04, 2007, 06:12:59 pm »
Thought you were a Mac man, Ramsus? Or is this screenshot brought to us by the magic of Boot Camp?

I am, but for various reasons I bought one of these at a Circuit City a month or two ago. It was the only one I would have bought too, since everything else was either over-priced or tastelessly designed.

So now I'm a PC user for the next three or four years until I get out of the Air Force.

Personally, I'd be wary of any laptop advertised as "Monitor sold seperately", but I hope it works well for you.

Ramsus

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #46 on: June 04, 2007, 10:20:36 pm »
Personally, I'd be wary of any laptop advertised as "Monitor sold seperately", but I hope it works well for you.

I could care less about superficial things like mistakes in the marketing and sales copy, which is why I went and looked at everything in person.

I'm glad I did too. This an extremely well designed machine. My guess is the team who designed it just happened to be the right people at the right time. Even the click on the trackpad just feels right. For something fairly small and light, it also feels quite sturdy and stable.

I'm just plain impressed; so much so that I've been using only this laptop from the moment I got it. I even lent my iBook G4 to someone else for the time being.

justin3009

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #47 on: June 04, 2007, 11:59:26 pm »
Ready for the messiest desktop ever?  http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/6329/mydesktopmc3.png

There's the image I had...>_>

[attachment deleted by admin]

Ramsus

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #48 on: April 26, 2009, 09:33:53 am »
Incredible thread revival time.

Anyway, you'll notice this is kind of an ugly screenshot -- default fvwm settings with some custom menus/usability changes and a plain black background, but it's very much custom under the hood.

Here I'm running a Gentoo installation on top of a vanilla kernel with realtime patches using jack with the alsa-jack plugin for mixing all the audio (no pulseaudio, esd, or artsd here), which makes pro-audio a lot easier (now I'm waiting on my new soundcard). Plus, everything is compiled with extra debugging symbols saved using splitdebug and with all the source code available for gdb to make coding and debugging sessions easier.

For extra screen space, I've enabled dual-head multi-monitor support using xrandr extensions (which ATI just added to their drivers a few months ago), with TwinView options turned on in the linuxwacom driver, so I can move from screen to screen more easily and still use the full tablet area for each separate screen. Add 4 virtual desktops, and I have plenty of space to work in without having to ever minimize anything.

I'd call it the perfect setup.


Shee

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #49 on: April 26, 2009, 05:07:19 pm »
What music program is that you're running there?  It looks unfamiliar to me.

Ramsus

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #50 on: April 26, 2009, 05:39:35 pm »
Rosegarden -- it's just a combined MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor -- by itself it's nothing special. I have a few virtual MIDI input devices (one uses the mouse that I haven't tested, another uses the regular PC keyboard), but since I don't have a real MIDI keyboard, I have to write out notes by hand rather than record them.

Fluidsynth -- This is a realtime MIDI software synthesizer that lets you load whatever sound fonts you want and apply some various effects to them.

Jack-Rack -- This is just a LADSPA filter rack that you can plug the output of any audio program into using jack. If you plug a guitar into your line in, then connect one of your line in capture ports to jack-rack's input ports, plug jack-rack into your recording program, you can run some distortion and effects filters in realtime, as you're recording. If you also plug jack-rack to your line out, you can software monitor as you record too, without enabling any special features in your recording program. If you have multiple capture ports on your soundcard, you can even run each input through a completely different set of programs with different filters and effects.

Some other interesting Linux programs are hydrogen for creating drum beat loops and ardour for recording audio tracks. You can also use ZynAddSubFX to make all sorts of tweaked, custom instruments, but I haven't had a chance to figure that one out yet.

I'm just starting to scratch the surface with this stuff though. There's so many little programs and tools out there for Linux audio that it's like being a kid in a candy store -- and I haven't even developed a good taste for candy yet. Except in this case, the candy is all free.

Not to mention that as a programmer, it's even more fun, since I can create my own effects and add my own software to the workflow very easily, due to the fact that Jack's C API is really simple and straightforward.

Shee

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #51 on: April 26, 2009, 08:33:47 pm »
Indeed!  I am very ignorant of Linux and its capabilities , but my biggest toy is Reason from Propellerhead.  I don't know if it's compatible or not, but it works on my Vista so reason suggests it should work on anything.??  Maybe, or maybe just a bad joke.

I also lack a MIDI controller or any other devices so I have to plug in my notes my hand, which can be painfully time consuming and ineffecient.  But it's also very rewarding, like eating pistachios.  Pistachioes?  I won't bother looking up the spelling, you understand.

RedNeckJiuJitsu

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #52 on: April 26, 2009, 09:41:55 pm »
On my laptop - http://img.wallpapers-zone.com/wallpapers/jeux_video/chrono_trigger/chrono_trigger_55305.jpg

On my tower - http://www.rpgplanet.com/chrono/images/ct/ctwp03(800).gif

I'm on XP, but I have Vista-ized icons and start bar, as I got sick of the XP look... I have no idea why. It's only been how many years? I'm thinking of going with an OSX theme next time though.

chrono eric

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #53 on: April 27, 2009, 12:41:53 am »
My laptop has a half-naked picture of my girlfriend on it currently and I'm pretty sure I would literally get killed if I posted it here.

KebreI

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #54 on: April 27, 2009, 03:10:15 am »
I have no bg or icons on my desktop because I just got my laptop working again last week and its crapping out again so...yea.

Before that though I had a random desktop generator. Some of my favorites:

Belaith

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #55 on: April 27, 2009, 04:25:30 am »
My desktop consists of shit and a pic of the love of my life. :) Just thought you should know.

IAmSerge

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #56 on: April 27, 2009, 04:53:28 am »
was 2 lazy to change my desktop from the original vista desktop.

...my T button seems to be going bad...

must try to retain its current technical status.... (notice the T's)

damn, seems its gotten better already >.>

Ramsus

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #57 on: April 27, 2009, 05:42:39 am »
Indeed!  I am very ignorant of Linux and its capabilities , but my biggest toy is Reason from Propellerhead.  I don't know if it's compatible or not, but it works on my Vista so reason suggests it should work on anything.??  Maybe, or maybe just a bad joke.

I also lack a MIDI controller or any other devices so I have to plug in my notes my hand, which can be painfully time consuming and ineffecient.  But it's also very rewarding, like eating pistachios.  Pistachioes?  I won't bother looking up the spelling, you understand.

You can run jack over a network transport and mix audio between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux machines using it, although keeping the latency low becomes more complicated, and the Windows part is still in heavy development.

And Reason, huh? Over on the Mac side, I know they have Logic, but Linux has neither. Just a lot of separate stuff. If it had a name, it'd be Reflex.

It was really frustrating for me to get everything in Linux working really well though, and I've been a Linux/BSD user for years now. Granted, if you have good hardware, and the right hardware, it's a lot easier and you'll get better results, but the difference between the way most Linux systems set up audio for everyday use (using pulseaudio and the like) and the way you handle pro-audio is so significant and the documentation so bad that it's almost like being lost in a labyrinth with no directions. If I weren't both used to Unix systems and also a programmer, I think I would've just bought some decent $500 software and a high quality soundcard -- maybe use a Mac too.

A few distributions like Ubuntu Studio are getting close to an out of box setup that's not bad though. I imagine a lot of teenagers with plenty of free time and not a whole lot of cash could still do a lot of cool stuff with Linux, and then profit off of it.

alfadorredux

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #58 on: April 27, 2009, 09:44:58 am »
Just for the sake of amusement, a completely different Linux desktop:



Like Ramsus, I'm running Gentoo.  Unlike him, I'm also running KDE (bit of a hog, compared to fvwm or similar lightweight window managers, but I'm kind of used to it).  Wallpaper courtesy of Digital Blasphemy.
« Last Edit: April 27, 2009, 09:47:45 am by alfadorredux »

Ramsus

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Re: Post Your Desktop
« Reply #59 on: April 27, 2009, 10:27:07 am »
What's crazy is that Firefox, all by itself, tends to use up more memory than any desktop environment does if you leave it running for more than a few hours, but when you have 8GB of memory installed, saving on resources doesn't really doesn't matter. The memory manager hasn't swapped anything out to disk even once on my system the entire time I've had it on -- I might as well just get rid of my swap partition. Even if I used KDE or Gnome, it'd be the same story.

Instead, when you have 4 seamless 2880x900 pixel virtual desktops, there's almost no reason to need a crowded little taskbar anywhere, because you stop layering or maxmizing windows.Throw in the fact that I just use the commandline for everything and never got into the habit of using file managers (to include when I had an iBook and used OS X all the time), you can pretty much see why I stick to fvwm. Now if only Firefox would let you tear off tabs as new windows.

I'd use a completely different setup on a mobile system with a small screen like a typical laptop though. FVWM just isn't meant for small screens.