All posts by Peter Ridge

Peter is a product development and management professional whose career has spanned from computer hardware and software engineering to product packaging, print advertising and user experience design. He is a published author and has applied his skills to a variety of businesses from start up ventures to top-10 media companies.
Software

TokBox: Free Video Chat, No Download Necessary

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Want to use video chat but don’t want to have to download and install more software on your computer? With TokBox, now you don’t have to.

This relatively new site (still beta, of course) makes use of Flash to enable you to do video and voice chat with your friends right from a web page. The video quality is a little grainy but that’s supposed to be fixed soon with Flash 9.

It’ll be interesting to see how much traffic they can handle as more people start using it. In order to avoid issues with firewalls, all the video and audio goes through TokBox’s servers so that’s going to be quite a lot of bandwidth. Just think YouTube times two!

Software

Fixed White Borders in Compiz Fusion

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As I mentioned the other day, I upgraded one of my systems from Kubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon and had to fix some quirks with Compiz Fusion. Another anomaly I had was the appearance of wide white borders around application menus as well as the K-Menu in KDE. It appeared as though the menu shadows weren’t being rendered properly.

Fortunately, the fix for that was quite easy. Instead of the default KDE window decorator, gtk-window-decorator, use Emerald. The package can be found in Adept. After installing it, run emerald –replace to turn it on without having to log out. To adjust settings and customize the window decorations, go to Settings in the K-Menu and run Emerald Theme Manager.

So far, I’m liking Compiz Fusion. It hasn’t crashed and it’s very fast. I don’t notice any performance penalty as compared to using the regular 2D desktop. Granted, the 3D animations are just eye candy but they’re fun.

Software

Test Live CDs via Virtualization with VirtualBox

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Last month, I posted about the free VirtualBox virtualization software and how you can use it to run various operating systems on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Intel CPU version) computers. Virtualization is also handy for quick and painless operating system evaluation purposes.

There are many Live CDs available today spanning a plethora of distributions of Linux, some Unices and you can even create your own Windows live CD. However, using them usually requires burning the ISO to a CD or DVD. Although media is cheap these days, it’s still a waste to burn discs just to try out things you may never continue using.

With VirtualBox, you don’t have to burn any discs to try things out. Simply follow these steps:

  1. Download the ISO file for the operating system you want to run. Verify from the description/help files/documentation that it is a bootable image (i.e. doesn’t require a boot floppy).
  2. Start VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine with enough memory for the operating system you’re going to try out.
  3. There’s no need to create a virtual hard drive for this machine if you’re using a Live CD/DVD since everything will run in memory. However, if it is an installation disc, then you will need to create a virtual hard drive large enough to install the operating system.
  4. Assign the ISO file to the virtual CD-ROM drive of the virtual machine.
  5. Start the new virtual machine.

Not only does this method reduce waste by avoiding the creation of plastic coasters (wasted CD/DVD media), it boots faster than a CD/DVD drive and your computer system is isolated from anything that may go wrong in the operating system you’re trying out.

So, now you’re all set to go play. Report back on the cool new operating systems you find.