May 26, 2007 by dragon_788.

A while back a friend of mine showed me a really sweet Linux command line interface called Yakuake, he found it in a screenshot on the kde-look.org site and we both thought it was a really great idea. The gist of it is instead of having the console (Linux term for CLI [command line interface]) take up an entire window you can have it “docked” to the top of the screen and only have it drop down when you need it, very similar to the effect if you hit ~ (tilde) in most fps/RPG games for the PC. This is nice so you can keep a root console available but not immediately visible for those times you are working on stuff that requires the privileges but not the window open the whole time. Its slightly more secure than using kdesu and having it save the password and I’ve read of one instance where a person scripted closing a root session after 15 minutes of inactivity for even more security.

My main goal with this post is to let those who like the idea of a easily accessible console but also want to be able to see what’s behind it for command references or whatever. I tried Yakuake under Ubuntu and Sabayon and I noticed Ubuntu has some nice themes included with the package and a couple are “transparent” but its only a meta-transparency, it simply takes a capture of your wallpaper and puts it behind the console to make it appear transparent, Sabayon doesn’t have these themes included by default. I searched for a while on the net for a solution but it appears that KDE won’t fully support transparency in Konsole (the base KDE package that Yakuake is built on) until KDE4 is out (its still in alpha currently). I was somewhat disappointed as KDE3.5.7 came out just a few days ago and with KDE4 being in alpha it may be months before its officially out. That’s why I was excited when I found this post, it tells how to enable a “real” transparency for Yakuake using Beryl (the lovely XGL effects window manager). You just open up the Beryl Manager, go to Window Management, then Set Window Attribs by various criteria, expand the Window Opacity option and click the plus sign to add a new criteria, in the option window select Window Title from the dropdown, and type Yakuake in the text box or if you have Yakuake open click the Grab button and click on the Yakuake window title bar. Move the slider to about 75(%) and click OK and you are ready to make your Yakuake truly transparent. Check the checkbox in front of the Set Window Attribs by various criteria option in the left pane and you should now have a transparent drop down console.

I didn’t attempt the 2nd fix which involved patching the source code, the reason being that I installed Yakuake through portage and/or apt-get so I didn’t really have a chance to apply the patch before the fact. Hopefully KDE4 comes soon with support for full tranparencies so we can have an ultra sexy Linux desktop beyond the amazing effects of Beryl/Compiz and XGL, which if you haven’t seen yet you should definitely search YouTube for some clips.

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May 26, 2007 by dragon_788.

To start off this series I’ll give you some background. I’m a geek, a major nerd, a massive egghead, a social introvert and any other descriptive term you can give to someone of a technologically skilled background. You wouldn’t know it to look at me though, other than the laptop/tablet PC that’s almost like an extension of my arm, when primped and polished I almost look like a normal person. Because I’m such a huge geek most of my friends and family like to razz on me for the various dorky things I do (and no I don’t mean acting like a ‘whale’ penis [Wikipedia informed me that the reference to whales make be a folk myth, so let’s stop the misinformation here]).

One day while I was hanging out at a local computer shop (the haven of geeks everywhere) one of my good friends started hassling me about finding a girlfriend (I wasn’t in a relationship at the time) and so I spent a lot of my time on/near or working with computers. As a result he began spouting off my “perfect woman” as a combination of high end parts of the time. The original configuration has escaped as a fleeting memory but the gist of it was “a chick with two huge blazing fast/hot PROCESSORS requiring some massive HEATSINKS for cover, a couple huge HARD DRIVES so she’d never forget a thing, a GIG or two of RAM so she could crunch the shopping list while making dinner, a screaming GRAPHICS CARD so she could always show her best side, a large LCD SCREEN so I could enjoy the view, a GIGABIT ETHERNET port for me to interface, and various other accouterments as her “bling”. His wife was almost rolling on the floor and the owner of the shop and his wife couldn’t stop laughing, I just shot them a sheepish grin and suggested something along the lines of she’d need a beefy POWER SUPPLY if she was going to keep up with all the things she’d be tasked with. We all had a good laugh and they still give me crap from time to time about it, even though we can’t remember half the hardware my dream “babe” had in her.

The point of the story is that we often personify the equipment we use from day to day, boats are often female as are cars, trucks I’d assume to be male but I’ve never looked under their bed to see what secrets they are hiding, and bits of technology are invariably infested with gremlins, whatever sex they might be. People often laugh or give me a strange look when I tell them a computer of mine (which often has a name) is acting up or being grouchy, yet at the same time it gives them a new way to look at their computer, even if it doesn’t have feelings sometimes our possessions reflect the owner. This series is going to be my take on various services, I’m going to try and keep from limiting myself so I’ll start off with common services run from ports/sockets on a PC, but I’ll try to expand into other areas as well. Stay tuned for the next edition of Services Personified and feel free to give me suggestions for services I should cover.

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