my life

Sorry to say it, but X.org eye candy is about to eclipse Mac OSX. Check out this video to see what I mean:

To get this for yourself on Debian, these are the steps I had to take.

1. apt-get install libcairo2 librsvg2-2 libglitz1 libglitz-glx1 compiz compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-plugins
2. Modify your X.org conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
3. Add the following to the “Device” section:
   
   Option “AllowGLXWithComposite” “true” Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”  #NVidia cards only
   
   Add the following to the “Screen” section:
   
   Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true”  # NVidia cards only
   
   Add the new section:
   
   Section “Extensions” Option  “Composite”      “Enable” EndSection
4. Enable all the cool features of compiz:
   
   gconftool --set /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/active_plugin --type list --list-type string ‘[gconf,png,svg,decoration,wobbly,fade,minimize,cube,rotate,zoom,scale,move,place,switcher,screenshot,resize]‘
5. echo “export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz” >> ~/.gnomerc
6. Restart Xorg

If you’re having problems, you can try to download:

And run compiz-check to see if there are any issues with your setup/hardware.

To get the features of OSX’s Docker, you’re going to want to install Cairo-Docker. Cairo-Docker is actually even MORE incredible than the traditional Docker, allowing for plugins and customization to the Nth degree.

1. Download Cairo at:
   https://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=8724
2. Download the dock package that looks like: cairo-dock_v1.6.3.1_i686.deb
3. Download the plugins package that looks like: cairo-dock-plug-ins_v1.6.3.1_i686.deb
4. dpkg -i package.deb
5. Simply run: cairo-dock

I was recently contacted by someone who got stuck setting up Starling and realized that the documentation is relatively sparse on setting up Starling. The process is easy once you know how Starling works on the inside, but not looking in.

To get started, I will assume you have ruby and ruby gems already installed. This will depend on your flavor of distribution, but should not be difficult and come standard on every modern version of Linux I’ve used.

run:

Create the Starling queue directory in /var/spool/starling

Start staring with these minimum set of arguments:

Also, if you’ll be running Starling in a PHP environment, make sure your version doesn’t have the EOL bug described in my post: http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/07/18/starling-protocol-bug-in-stats-response

Also, note that Starling creates a queue file for each key verbatim. So if a key is, ‘namespace/something’, then Starling will fail to do the set if the ‘namespace’ directory does not exist under the /var/spool/starling directory. You can also just not use ‘/’ in your keys.

Also, note that Starling does not automatically purge the queue files after it rotates them. You’ll want to cron a job to run periodically to delete them. We run this nightly to purge files not accessed in 4 days:

All that being said, we’re still very happy with it and process about a million jobs a day.

Please let me know in the comments if your still having problems!