Fun stuff!

Well, I've gotten a little of what I wanted to accomplished today...mainly to do with beryl. ;-/ yeah - the eye candy is great, but what a pain... I'm not sure which instructions I actually followed the first time I installed beryl...but the result was that in the midst of my goofing around with the settings, my title bar and sides to my windows disappeared (yeah, couldn't move, resize, minimize, maximize or close all open programs). Needless to say this was irritating. I eventually came across an article on PC World which had slightly different instructions for me, I ran them and somehow two more programs were installed and beryl is working pretty decently for me now.

still haven't gotten my mp3s playing, though I think it's just a matter of getting the programs to use my audio card (and not the built-in one on my motherboard) - though I'm not too sure where those settings are at the moment...

still haven't gotten any DVDs to play - couldn't find "libdvdcss2" in synaptic package manager - though I found everything else. Again, suggestions welcome...

I did get WINE installed and eSword through that - though I had already found an article by someone who had done the legwork to make that compatible with WINE and everything. I'm hoping to be able to run Dreamweaver 2, QuickVerse 2005, and maybe even Microsoft Word and Excell 2000 through that. Those are about the only programs I use in Windows which have specific functions that I can't find in any open source linux stuff (the main thing for Word is the "document map" function which I use to organize my class notes - anyone know how to do the equivalent in OpenOffice?).

Next up, other than figuring out my mp3 and DVD woes, is customizing my panels. Gnome defaults are nice...but I've seen some screenshots which were way better....