Free And Open Desktop Discussion

QuickBreeze asked about this today and his email has seemed to have changed, just in case you didn't get the email, here's the Setup.

Ok, so I've been wanting to get a private cloud going with trusted users, and friends, but since many of you are long time friends, I figured this was a good place to start. People that have been verified by either the community or myself, can join the swarm. OneSwarm client is working great and running all the better every day, it's a power tool for anonymity even in a trusted ring of users.

The other day when I was over at QuickBreeze's house, I noticed he was running Linux Mint on his desktop via my recommendation. I knew it was great for a new Linux user having all of the 'bad' stuff, e.g. codecs, etc. pre-installed. Although I must admit, the more I use it, the more I like it, I've spent a few days over there and really gotten to know it. It's basically Ubuntu of course but here are some very nice aesthetic changes which I can say are honestly and upgrade from the usage standpoint.

Using this tutorial, in about 15 minutes you can have your machine doing both Folding@Home on the processor and utilizing your video card as well. Video cards are capable of an extreme amount of computing power when utilized efficiently. Putting this to work on your machine will definitely boost your points! I have done this to QuickBreeze's machine and tested it successfully. It is running more than 3x the speed of the CPU client with a very similar size WU. This is definitely worth doing!

Ok, so now that you can attach files to threads etc, I thought I would start a screen shot thread to let everyone show off their desktop...And to see how lazy Preston is lol, :P. I guess I'll start.  

In this example, I had a machine with no CD-ROM that I was trying to install Ubuntu on. I had another laptop handy with Ubuntu on it so here we go. I chose the Ubuntu 9.04 i386 cd .ISO image [ to download. to use for installation.

The installation is extremely simple. Just install the portable linux package which is easily installed in Ubuntu.

I'd like to see exactly every change made to make this possible, and mostly why this hasn't happened before if the changes aren't that significant. If a normal desktop machine is booting up this fast, imagine a highly configured car-pc, etc. This is really getting somewhere :D.

I've been known for my insane ability to try out new things at an alarming/unhealthy rate. In my first 4-5 years I was a die hard KDE user but then as my machine at the time aged I started to go ultra-lite with fluxbox and blackbox on occassion. Sometime around my sixth year of using FreeBSD I started experimenting with Gnome and liked it. Ever since I've been hooked and use it primarily on my desktop. Overall I'd have to say that for me in the given situations here's my prefered usage:

Main Desktop: GDM/Gnome
Low-Resource Environment: Fluxbox
VNC over SSH: fluxbox :D