Notes from Linuxtag (Luminocity, Microsoft cubes)

Yesterday I forgot to take my laptop-powerplug from linuxtag with me and as my battery was quite empty, I couldn't blog yesterday. So here are some more impressions from Linuxtag.

Luminocity - Eyecandy for X

After I saw it at the X.org-booth on Linuxtag, I had to try out the nifty features the xorg-devs are working on. One really nice thing is luminocity. You have waving windows, which looks really cool. I found a HOWTO in the Gentoo Forum, which worked right away. I was really impressed by the performance of waving, half transparent windows. I also made a small video of it (it's ogg theora).

While many people may think this is just playing around, imho eyecandy is quite important. That's one of the reasons why MacOS X is so successful. I'm really looking forward when those features will be available on usual desktops.

Reverse engineering Microsoft cubes

At the Microsoft-booth on Linuxtag, you could get some nice white cubes with colored lights in it. Sadly, they had no open interface for it, so we tried to reverse engineer them. We weren't able to install Gentoo on them yet.

Geekish art

A project at the Linuxtag was creative geeks, a group of people creating creative commons licensed art with linux stuff (e. g. tux-pictures).
Another very nice thing were the konqi-videos from kde, they are made with blender. I didn't know that blender is that good (though I'll probably never learn how to use it).