Day Four

Posted on 14 Nov 2008 at 15:00

I wake up to a text message from my friend explaining that her computer has exploded and taken all her pictures from our trip with it. I've offered her my snaps, but I'm the world's worst photographer and they're going to require the kind of heavy touching-up usually reserved for a Jordan photo shoot. This gives me a chance to get stuck into the preinstalled GIMP image editor, which turns out to be wonderful. There are some great effects, and enough image-sharpening and manipulation tools to make even my cack-handed photography look marvellous. A couple of luminescent sunsets later and I burn them to CD using the preinstalled idiot-proof Brasero software. Even my dad could do this, and he works his keyboard with a hammer.

Job done, I head over to YouTube to watch Steve McClaren make an idiot of himself with his comedy Dutch accent, where I'm cheerfully informed that I'll need to install Flash and am redirected to the official site with the choice of three Linux downloads: tar.gz, YUM and RPM. I hit the internet intending to find out what these baffling terms mean, but my magpie eye is distracted by something far more glittering - the cube desktop effect. I've been meaning to prettify Ubuntu since I started, and the moment I click the link, all practical considerations are thrown out of the window. Apparently the cube effect gives me four desktops which can be displayed on a floating 3D surface.

I follow the instructions and before I know it I'm typing commands I don't understand into the terminal willy nilly, drunk with the possibility of watching my desktops floating on a 3D cube, and windows wobbling out of view when I close them. Finally this headlong rush into beauty nirvana is brought to a screeching halt by a blinding white screen. I've killed my desktop. I retreat to Fedora, and scour the web for answers. As it turns out it's as simple as resetting my graphics driver, accomplished by hitting "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg". I'm back in business and then something miraculous happens: I drag a window and it wibbles like jelly on a trampoline. All of a sudden I'm as giddy as a schoolboy flicking his first elastic band at a girl.

Along with packages that offer hundreds of effects and allow you to install Mac-like docks and Vista-themed makeovers, there's scope for building a completely customised desktop. This is what Vista's Aero should have been.

Next: Day Five

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Author: Stuart Turton