I was totally surprised, when looking outside my window today, to see that the A-Team decided to park their car beneath my appartment!

I first tried compiz more than one year ago, thanks to the Kororaa Live CD. As expected, I was really impressed by the effects and the fluidity of the system. But my early experience stopped there because the support for Gentoo 64bits was quite limited at that time.

Of course, I’ve tried Compiz and Beryl on Gentoo later on, but it was quite instable, so I rapidly quit…

When I’ve switched to Ubuntu, first on my laptop, then on my main computer, I’ve tried it again, it the same order: first Compiz then Beryl. I found Compiz rather limited and not enough configurable. Beryl, on the counterpart, was extensively configurable (about everything was customizable) and featured more effects and plugins. So I sticked with it for a rather long time, the window manager being more stable than before.

Then I’ve learned about the fusion of Beryl back into Compiz (back because originally, Beryl was a fork of compiz created by enthousiasts who found that Compiz wasn’t developped like they wanted it to be). Some weeks later, I’ve made the switch from Beryl to Compiz Fusion. And once again, I was impressed by the various effects: all the Beryl plugins are present, and more are available.

You may think that this is only about Eye Candy, but Compiz Fusion really helps to increase your productivity, by making it easier to arrange your windows, to switch from one window to another, to switch desktops when the mouse approaches the screen edges, and so on…

Enough talking, time for some screenshots of the most impressive and beautiful effects:

And here comes the best: Compiz Fusion eats very few system resources. As an exemple, it runs perfectly on my old laptop (Centrino 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM, 64MB Video memory), where windows Vista wouldn’t be welcome at all…

Until now, I had to play daily with my antenna to watch TV without too many “snow” on the screen, the image never being perfect. If the weather was really bad, I had to cope with an image switching from B&W to color each 5s and the sound being cut by “scrrrrchhhh”.

So I decided to buy a digital terrestrial receiver – also known as DVB-T receiver. In Belgium, there are only 5 TV channels available (La Une, La Deux, RTBF Sat, één and Ketnet/Canvas) plus some radio channels (Classic21, PureFM, Studio Brussel, etc). That’s not much compared to other countries like France, but still more than what I had with a simple analog antenna and in a much much much better quality – the image is simply PERFECT, so is the sound!

The receiver is a small box equipped with antenna In and Out (internal loop), SCART output, additional Audio output (connected to my Hi-Fi system which doesn’t have a radio tuner), a remote control, and that’s about it. It’s easily configurable, you can store favourite channels (you get it, with 5 channels, all are my favourites!), see TV programs when supported, and so on. It’s a great deal when you compare the impressive increase in quality and comfort with the price (55€). The only drawback is that I have an additional remote to store!