Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking of some ideas for a shell. Some of
the ideas I’ve been thinking of invlolve the use of miniture application Windows
instead of the current minimised ’taskbar’ style representation. I think that
multiple desktops would be very well suited to this form of minimisation. The
concept of using different virtual desktops for different tasks is not a new
one. For example, in Linux my second desktop is for work, third for Web, forth
Media and so on. Many current virtual desktops do not take this separation of
roles into account, just giving the user more than one of the same desktop.
Modifying the virtual desktop idea into more of a virtual ’task space’ paradigm
would increase the use of such technology.
New version of ShellOn! This is a release candidate: rc1. With these release candidates we are moving towards a final release. The feature set is now frozen for version 3.0. Please send in bug reports!
As a test of ‘just what happens when you do it?’, I’ve set the minumum font size of my browser to 12px. Many sites, including dx13 itself, use font sizes smaller than this. For example, the font used for the tabs above are size 10px. This means that they are now appearing larger than when I originally designed them. Fortunately on this page, it doesn’t make much difference to the layout.
By way of an expansion to my previous couple of posts. Linux in can play games shocker! I can now play many of my favourite games in Linux, thanks to a couple of native ports and Winex. I now have the following games up and running on my Linux install:
Native:
Winex:
I’m quite impressed, and have left Windows behind for now as I can play all my favourite games on Linux now. I have had problems with lots of games with Winex, though. I can’t get either Baldur’s Gate I or Icewind Dale to work, which is a shame. I also can’t play Sim City 3000. However, all in all I am happy with my selection of games.
More Linux gaming goodness. Now, I know many people view Transgaming with dislike, but personally I think their work is useful. I will use native where possible and will buy new games that work on Linux, but for games I own already, WineX is a good thing, imo. To your right, there’s a picture I like the look of: StarCraft, Baldur’s Gate II and Civilization III all on one of my desktops. Now, my PC obviously slows to a crawl with them all going, so they’re only like that for the screenshot!
They all seem to work very well indeed, with little or no problems. StarCraft in particular is just like it is on Windows. All in all, very cool.