Here's what I spent my Thursday night doing:

Tricking out my WindowMaker setup. Took some trial and error, but I think I have it the way I like it.

To explain this a little better,  WindowMaker is based on OPENStep, which was based on NEXTStep OS. NEXTStep was created by Steve Jobs, then CEO of NEXT in 1988. That GUI looked a lot like this 1992, not including the Conky I added in the upper right corner. Several options include being able to 
"roll up" your windows by double clicking the title, right clicking and selecting minimize, the Dock (very adjustable, the Black and White symbol on the right) and most importantly: very fast and lightweight. This allows for usage on just about any system that can compile it regardless of system specs. There is also a menu available, you just right click anywhere on the desktop and it will pop open. You can also leave the menu open by clicking the title of the part of the menu you want to keep open, meaning if I have a submenu open I can click that and leave it open instead of the whole menu. Adding to the Dock is easy, simply open a program, then grab the created icon in the lower left corner (default location for currently open, undocked programs) and drag it to the dock. Any closed programs have 3 dots on the icon, open ones do not. You can also have multiple workspaces, but I like to stick to one as I haven't adjusted to the keystrokes and such for flipping between screens yet. That is controlled by the Paperclip icon. You can also name your workspaces. One other really cool thing is you can save the state of the Workspaces before a logout, which is persistent across shutdowns and restarts.

Ok so I downloaded Conky as well, found a .conkyrc I liked, and then modified it to fit my needs a little better. This post really isn't intended to be a guide on how to do it, there is plenty of information around the Internet on how to setup Conky. In a nutshell I needed a battery meter so I decided to grab Conky and I found a .conkyrc that included a battery gauge, had an overall look I liked, and had some neat options I could activate if I wanted to. 
Had the option to load a log file and display it's contents, which is very cool. Considered modifying it so I had another script that parsed the log file, stripped out any non-essential bs I didn't need, and appended that to a temp file for loading with Conky, but I decided I didn't need that. Might take a different route and have a Terminal open with the same information unparsed as it would be easier to read and it would keep Conky simple.

That's all I have for now, I'll make a post soon about my experience with Linux From Scratch that didn't end up so well,  but I learned a lot from it.

Catch you on the flip side, and don't let the Man get you down.

Ok kiddos, I just setup Fedora on my Desktop and was looking into a way to make VLC be an "alarm clock" if you will. More like an alarm video player but hey who cares? I just wanted it to greet my inert, sleeping, lazy ass with awesomesauce in the morning. (Specifically, Empire Records Fan Edition in this case.)

So I made a bash script to handle this. One caveat, the script worked awesomely stand-alone. As a cron-job? Forget it. Cron's output of the console information was useful because vlc was barking about not finding a display to play to. So I set about looking for information through Google and a lot of it was old postings, so I felt it was possibly outdated so I checked only the last year and found some newer threads but nothing extremely useful. I looked over the older (3+ years old) threads and after lots of poking about and tinkering, found one that works as a cronjob and conveniently found it works as a regular executable script afterwards as well, so I can still easily debug any edits to the file linking.

#!/bin/bash

# DISPLAY=:0.0 is what allows vlc to display to the screen without error because your forcing it to a screen. Theoretically you should be able to output to an alternate screen on your local machine, potentially on another machine altogether.

DISPLAY=:0.0 vlc --rc-fake-tty -f file:///path/to/file/of/choice/or/link

That's it. Seriously. I lol'd at it's simplicity. Essentially, anything VLC can play, you just edit the line to accommodate that. I'm going to try a playlist because that would be easier to maintain seeing as I can make one in VLC and save it when I'm done, and just reference that in the script.

Ok, I mentioned in the comments of the script that you can output to another screen. Let me break that down for you:

DISPLAY is the variable your modifying.
DISPLAY:0.0 is set to your primary screen on your localhost.
DISPLAY:localhost.0 is the same thing. You could also set it to the hostname, but why would you???
DISPLAY:randomhostname.0 routes your output to the primary screen on another machine of choosing, can be useful if displaying information to someone else or sharing a video stream to someone else.

That being said, I do not believe it transmits audio, will test that later myself from my desktop to my laptop. It's late now, I must retire to my bedchambers. I will make an edit to this post later telling you of my results.

Edit: I found that doing it from the server to my machine was... unpleasant with VLC. The video stuttered, and no audio (I'm guessing it was playing locally.) However I could see this being useful with say a web browser and getting particular files and instead of using wget for everything you could use Chrome or Firefox instead. Just food for thought.

--Dustin Klingele (hackersarchangel)

I've been looking into this recently, trying to get the games I own to play in Linux.  In the past I have had to fiddle with W.I.N.E. (Wine is Not an Emulator) in order to get anything to really work, also having to Download modules to get certain things going can be a pain. As linux doesn't really tell you, what your missing or how to fix it.  Just recently, I discovered an ubuntu based OS that has just about every package you could ever use including all it's dependency's already packaged. and I'm not talking about Only an office suite, or a DVD playing program. I'm talking, Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Office, VirtualBox, WINE, PS# Media Streaming, DVD Burning, DVD Labeler, Lightscribe, Blue Ray Software, Blue ray burning software, and way too many for me to list, heck, I can't even find a list of programs they currently have installed.  The OS is called http://pinguyos.com/ "Linux made easy"  Now Ubuntu claims it's easy to use for windows user's but because of other complications and such it can't really do everything at once.  The guys/Community at PINGUY have decided to expand on that and make an interface that's easy to use, both Tech and User friendly.  Just an example of how easy it really is.  I installed this OS, copied over my WOW folder, ran the wow.exe and I was up and running.  Only had to tweak my audio driver, and a 5 min search on Google gave me that answer.  Other thoughts on this topic, Game tester's have been testing the different OS's and which runs better.  Linux beat out MAC, and WIN7 by 5FPS.  Now to the Normal user, that's not a really big deal.  But to true gamers it is,  and that's a major breakthrough to gaming companies.  With windows 8 coming out and everything being bad about it on a  desktop, and mac's being so expensive.  Maybe this is the year or two that LINUX can really hit up the Market.  There's also another site that is called "The 31 Flavors of Linux" http://webpath.net/31-flavors a great place to start just to find out what Linux distro might tickle your fancy.