Through my research I found out that XGL is just useless by it's self. Compiz is what allows it to do so many awesome things. That kinda helps to get the idea of why you have to install compiz and why you always hear about them together.

XGL is an add-on to x-server that allows it to do bend windows and make your desktop into a cube and other things it can't do by itself. It really is cool and I believe it's worth installing. That requires that you find good instructions that are up to date. I found such instructions at compiz's own web site www.compiz.net. These are up to date as of 8/2006. They may still be up to date in the future too but if not, I advise that you search on compiz.net to find your instructions. I had tried a set I found through google and they didn't work. It actually screwed some things up I had to fix, also I tried instructions from the Ubuntu Forums and they were less than successful.

Ubuntu updated their repository to now include version 1.4.2 of Amarok. Wow is this thing awesome. I like the new look alot and it plays music really well. What I really like is the added functionality in the menus. The last.fm playlist feature is great. I've been listening to other peoples music a lot now.

In the past I've loved Amarok but I started to use Listen music player since it fit with Gnome and GTK. Listen is good, but it just doesn't have the same feel and layout design as amarok. I have to say that amarok really takes the cake here. They've basically beat up and stole Listen's lunch money. I'm going to be using amarok a lot more now, it's just awesome.

Thought I might post some tricks and hacks that I found in my searching on teh interweb. You can copy paste any of the commands into your browser.

Read on for some good tips.

This isn’t exactly in order for being a blog, but I have found one thing that could be concerning for other dual-booters out there. If you have a program that mounts your ext3 drive (or probably any Linux format) in windows, if you hibernate windows and then boot into Linux, it can cause some real problems. You need to go into windows and shut down properly first, this will unmount the volume in question. It actually took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but then it dawned on me. If you try to mount a drive that was never unmounted by your other OS, things that you need were never closed properly.

I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to convert my .rm and .ram files to mp3. I finally found it by searching for something to encode an mp3 from a wma. This works for wma, Real Media or any other format that your mplayer is set up to play. Also so everyone knows I did not come up with this on my own, I found it here and had to make some changes to make it compatible with enhancements in mplayer.

Here are the steps: