Revisit Royale Noir

I know I’ve failed to post for the last little while.  But with good reason, my FreeNAS server crashed (destroying the drive) which I intend to post about once I’ve fixed it, I have also been writing a few pieces of software for my clients, and 1 for the open source community (again, I will post this once I have something more “polished” for general consumption)

But, since i’ve been looking at the same page of posts for the last couple of weeks i thought i owe it to you to write something… anything, just to keep you (and me) on our toes.

Since this is something of a revisit but I think it’s quite catching and really a nice personal touch that many of us can use to make our windows boxes just a little more unique.

It’s called “Royale Noir”, a secret hidden XP theme that is only available using a special “luna.msstyles” visual settings file by Microsoft.

Installation is a snap, you just download the royale_noir.zip file that I literally stole from the old “istartedsomething” post (see:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/uploads/royale_noir.zip
) unzip it into a “royale noir” subdirectory in your “%WINDIR%\resources\themes\” folder, double click on the “luna.msstyles” file and select “Noir” from the colour scheme.

Beautiful.

 

Royal Noir Display Properties

If you want to see the original post:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/

Burn a CDROM to a friend?

Ever wanted to send your friend a cdrom, but didn’t want to send an iso or whatever?  this is for you!

http://0xcc.net/cdfax/index.html.en

Alternative, Alternative Operating Systems

I love operating systems, the heart of any good computer.  Because of my love for the “OS” I have become a sort of collector of Operating Systems.  My virtual machine “LAB” contains nearly one hundred different operating systems. 

Because of this interest I’m going to list a few of the less famous but still noteworthy ones here, sort of top 3 of the unknown OS market.

1. Haiku (
http://www.haiku-os.org/
)

• I LOVED BeOS, I still do.  It had a very slick interface, beautiful to look at, and very multimedia friendly.  I heard rumors that this was going to be the next Mac OS (before X) but that it didn’t pan out.  Palm bought BeOS, and grounded the OS.  Hooray for open-source, where teams of guys like me (but not me) went out and decided to build a binary compatible version of BeOS.  That’s the origins of Haiku.

2. ReactOS (
http://www.reactos.org/
)

• I hate Windows.  It was poorly designed from the beginning, because of its single user mentality it just hasn’t been able to catch up.  Maybe this will change in Windows 7 (though I doubt it).  Hooray for open-source, where teams of guys like me (but no, not me) went out and decided to build a FREE binary compatible version of Windows.  That’s te origins of ReactOS, which to me looks fairly useable, and actually quite close to Windows binary compatibility.

3. SkyOS (
http://www.skyos.org/
)

• SkyOS is an attempt at building a FAST and stable OS from the ground up.  In Assembly.  Quite a project, and it’s quite beautiful.  It has a very quick kernel, and well optimized source.  The problem is that development is very slow, and updates are few and far between.  But quite a nice operating system to watch.

I have personally installed and run each of these with little to no problems on an older machine.  They’re quite nice projects, and (at least in my opinion) nearly user friendly enough for the common desktop market (especially in the cases of Haiku and ReactOS)

Interesting bash prompts

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, been busy working on many MANY things.  However, I did find this which I find quite intersting

There’s some really cool bash prompts at this site:

http://maketecheasier.com/8-useful-and-interesting-bash-prompts/2009/09/04

In my opinion bash is getting quite large and a bit of a resource hog, for a shell that is; but with all it’s bloat comes some VERY decent features, including the ability to modify your prompt to run small shell scripts and display the output. 

The site shows 8 simple examples; but my favorite one displays a happy “^_^” emoticon or a “O_O” emoticon if the last command succeeded or failed:

PS1=“\`if [ \$? = 0 ]; then echo \[\e[33m\]^_^\[\e[0m\]; else echo \[\e[31m\]O_O\[\e[0m\]; fi\`[\u@\h:\w]\\$ “