Compiz making your computer slow??

The recent problem faced by me was that suddenly after an online update my computer went too slow….i could feel the zagginess while while moving windows. After using “ctrl+esc” i realized that Xorg was using a lot of CPU % which didnt come below 25% n every thing was getting slow coz of it. I though it was due to some problem in compiz or Xorg n will vanish after one or two updates but that didn’t happen so it striked to me that it must be due to some plugin so i turned off all the plugins n every thing was normal again :)

I started to turn on each plugin one by one and observe the changes n i saw that blur plugin was on but its own n it was causing the problem and also the reflection plugin was causing the problem ( well i dont have a graphics card n if u do maybe reflection plugin wont make a difference i think) so u can try this n if even this doesnt solve the problem try switching off the KDE4 native effects. Hope this will solve the similar problem faced by any of u :)

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
Today’s Security Updates…

CentOS has updated evolution (arbitrary code execution), cups (arbitrary code execution via crafted PNG), evolution28 (multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated kernel (unspecified vulnerability).

Red Hat has updated evolution (RHEL 3,4, RHEL 4.5, RHEL 5: arbitrary code execution), evolution28 (RHEL 4: multiple vulnerabilities), cups (arbitrary code execution via crafted PNG).

Ubuntu has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
Compiz 0.7.6 is out…

Compiz 0.7.6 is out with a splash. The long tested Full sphere is out in the stable XGL repo and trust me it looks amazing.Though it took a little time for me to find out from where to turn it on. Well u can find it in the “effects” group under the “Cube reflection and deformation” plugin. There under the “Deformation” tab you can chose between the sphere and cylinder or a notmal cube. And if u select sphere and remove the tick from the “Deform caps” and “Cube Atlantis” is on then u will see a very very cute aquarium :) i have added a screen shot with it.

Another thing added is the “Static Switcher” plugin which shows thumbnails of all the open windows and moves caret instead of thumbnails.

One more thing added is the wallpaper plug in.This plugin helps u keep a different wallpaper for each phase of the cube. The only problem with this plug in is that right now Kdesktop doesnt support transperency so u wont be able to see the wallpaper set by compiz. At this point of time you have 3 options — first is that you can kill kdesktop but the problem is you wont be able to see the icons on your desktop. Second option is there is a patch available for transparency support but you will have to re-build kde-base.Third option is that u wait for the changes to come pre-built with the new kde-base :P

These were the differences i noticed n there might be more. If any of u find out, can paste it as a comment to this post :)


Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comment (1)
Today’s Security Updates…

Debian has updated libvorbis (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated imlib2 (F7, F8, F9: buffer overflow in the XPM loader), libpng (F7, F8, F9: denial of service).

Gentoo has updated mtr (stack-based buffer overflow), libxslt (code execution).

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
Security updates….

Debian has updated samba (arbitrary code execution), linux-2.6 (multiple vulnerabilities), ikiwiki (update to previous security update)

Fedora has updated samba (F7, F8, F9: arbitrary code execution), openssl (F9: multiple vulnerabilities).

rPath has updated samba (arbitrary code execution), openssl, openssl-scripts (denial of service).

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
Compiz is back :)

Finally Compiz is back in openSUSE 10.3….the latest update from the XGL openSUSE repo fixed the problem. But there is also another change that comes with new version of XGL… now the old command - “gnome-xgl-switch” no longer works…. now the command to start xgl is “xgl-switch –enable-xgl” and to stop it is “xgl-switch –disable-xgl”.

There are many new features added…i will test them and add new posts about them with screen shots :)

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
New Wine…

Wine 0.9.59 is out….

  • Improved support for the .NET framework.
  • Better services handling through a separate services.exe process.
  • Support for ATI fragment shader.
  • Better support for http proxies.
  • Window management fixes.
  • Pre-compiled fonts are now available in the source tree.
  • Lots of bug fixes.

Well i hope the proxy thing will bring update in picasa which will help use of proxy for uploading pics to web albums…

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comment (1)
Skype 2.0 out

Good news for all voice+video chat lovers… Skype 2.0 is finally out as a stable version.

  • Hardware requirements
  • 1 Ghz processor or faster
  • 256 MB RAM.
  • 20 MB free disk space on your hard drive.
  • Microphone and speakers or headset.
  • Internet connection (broadband is best, GPRS is not supported for voice calls, and results may vary on a satellite connection). .
  • Video card driver with Xv support.
  • Software requirements
  • Qt 4.2.1+
  • D-Bus 1.0.0
  • libasound2 1.0.12

Skype 2.0 supports both video and voice chat support. all you need is a webcam and its drivers installed. The other requirements are listed above.

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/linux/choose/

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
Compiz Fusion 0.7.2

Compiz fusion and compiz have been updated to version 0.7.2  with the following updates —

Compiz:
- Translation support in gtk-window-decorator.
- Updated translations.
- Added wrapable session functions to core. This allows to provide a full
session save/restore in a plugin.

Compiz Fusion:
New Plugins:
compiz-fusion-plugins-main:
- session: Communicates with session manager to save/restore window state
- bs: Change window brightness and saturation with key/button bindings
- mousepoll: Provides a generic system for other plugins to get the current
mouse position
- mag: Provides a magnifying glass under the mouse pointer with 3 different
display modes (simple/image overlay/fisheye)

compiz-fusion-plugins-extra:
- 3d: Adds depth to your desktop by raising windows in layers off the cube
- loginout: Provides a simple system to implement login and logout animations
- maximumize: Resizes a window to fit within the available empty screen space
- notification: Displays error messages on the screen with libnotify
- shelf: Shrinks a window to a preset size for monitoring many windows at once
- showmouse: Paints particle emitters that orbit the mouse pointer to make it
more visible

compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported:
- atlantis: Renders an aquarium inside of the transparent cube

Configuration manager changes:
ccsm:
- Action settings were split into button, key, and edge settings, each using
its own widget.

simple-ccsm:
- New settings manager focused on simplicity and aimed at end users

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)
Security Updates…

Debian has updated libicu (arbitrary code execution).
Fedora has updated phpMyAdmin (F7, F8: information disclosure), ghostscript (F8: buffer overflow).
Gentoo has updated mantis (cross-site scripting), splitvt (privilege escalation), sword (shell command injection), paramiko (information disclosure).
Mandriva has updated wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities).

Posted by: rishabh_kalra | Comments (0)