{ the Asus Eee PC 1000H from 2008. source: laptopnext.com }

Now that I’m educated in the science of netbooks, I’m pretty impressed by them. Not by their power, of course, which is laughable compared to a decent laptop. Most mid-range netbooks now have 1.6 ghz Intel Atom single-core CPU, compared to the typical laptop’s 2 ghz or more dual-core CPU. And if you’re thinking about playing modern 3d games on a netbook, forget about it (although there are some that will work — barely). Usually, the best you can do on a netbook as far as graphics is watch videos on Youtube.

edit: Apparently there are some netbooks with good graphics performance, such as the Asus N10. It has a GeForce 9300M GS as well as integrated graphics, with the ability to switch between the two (but this requires a reboot). With this particular netbook you can play older games smoothly and even some newer games, and of course hi-def movies. The battery lasts around 5 hours even when running Nvidia graphics. Very nice. The downside is the price: $680.

What’s attractive about netbooks is their mobility and the fact that they’re very cheap. If you just need to check your email and write a few documents on the go, and maybe surf the web while you’re bored, a netbook seems ideal. The average netbook is around $400, and many are a lot cheaper. More money in your pocket = more happy. (Assuming you’re happy with a netbook…)

Most netbooks nowadays have screens somewhere around 10″. While on the one hand that means great mobility, on the other hand it means a small screen and a rather cramped keyboard. I’ve heard that prolonged use of such a small keyboard can be uncomfortable. I don’t have firsthand experience though. Another drawback of this small size is that netbooks don’t have CD/DVD drives built in. For what netbooks are designed for (doing stuff on the web), it doesn’t matter all that much, but still, it’s an inconvenience to use an external optical drive if you ever want use CDs or DVDs.

Battery life is another strong point. Most netbooks go upwards of 5 hours on a 6-cell battery, some even 8 hours.

I’ll probably end up getting a laptop as planned, because I really want that extra power, but netbooks look interesting anyways. The future of netbooks looks promising, especially now that Google is making an OS for netbooks (!!). And soon the NVIDIA Ion chipset will be out, which will make graphics better on netbooks. A few Ion netbooks are already on the way.

So yesterday (June 28) was ALL CAPS DAY. Hopefully you turned on caps lock and shouted all day long. Unfortunately I missed it until it was too late. I hope you’ll forgive me, Billy Mays. RIP :’(

I got to thinking about the caps lock key because of ALL CAPS DAY, and it took me a while to remember the last time I used it. It was last month… oh wait, that was when I pressed it by accident. The month before that I used a few times… no, those were accidents too. 90% of the times my caps lock key is pressed, it’s either unintentional or it’s my cat. This is called Unintentional Caps Lock Syndrome (UCLS), and UCLS often leads to Uppercase Password Disorder (UPD), a horrifying condition that causes irritability, fits of rage, and, in extreme cases, technophobia.

If caps lock were somewhere else on the keyboard it would be alright. But as it is, it’s more useful if it’s turned off. So here’s how to silence the beast that is caps lock. This article is just for Windows, but I’ll write something like this for Linux sometime.

Also… I had to put this in here somewhere: PROCAPSLOCK.ORG. Funny stuff.

real men read guides

I found a very thorough guide that tells how to remap caps lock (or any other key) to another key by editing the registry, and how to completely disable caps lock or any other key. Reading this will put you well on your way to becoming a key-mapping guru!

quick fixes

If you have the attention span of a squirrel and/or you are lazy and/or you actually have a life aside from mapping the keys on your keyboard (does such a thing even exist??), here are some .reg files so you don’t have to edit the registry yourself. After downloading one, all you have to do is double click the file (or right-click -> Merge), confirm the registry edit, and then reboot.

Because scroll lock is even more useless than caps lock, you might want to remap scroll lock to caps lock just in case you ever want to use caps lock (like on ALL CAPS DAY). The “+move to scroll lock” file does this.

-disable caps lock

-caps lock to shift . . . . . . . . . . . . +move to scroll lock

-caps lock to escape . . . . . . . . . +move to scroll lock

-caps lock to backspace . . . . . . +move to scroll lock

-caps lock to windows key . . . . +move to scroll lock

-caps lock to control. . . . . . . . . . +move to scroll lock

-clear all key remaps (resets the keyboard layout to default)

Not that it matters much, but the files above that map caps lock to shift, control, or the windows key refer to left shift, left control, and the left windows key.

As for me, I mapped my caps lock key to escape. Now instead of having to use two hands to bring up the task manager (ctrl + alt + del), I can just smack one hand down on ctrl + shift + caps lock! You call it laziness, but I call it efficiency.

Seeing as how I haven’t switched OSes or gone on a customization frenzy this week, I’ll talk about a little something I found a few months ago. Rockbox is its name. MP3 players are its business. Awesomeness is its nature.

Rockbox is an open source firmware for MP3 players and iPods. Firmware, in case you don’t know, is like the little operating system on your MP3 player. Rockbox to iPods is kind of like what Linux is to computers… except that there’s actually Linux for iPods.

So open source is (usually) pretty cool and all, but why not just stick to your regular firmware? Rockbox lists many reasons, but basically it’s because Rockbox has lots more features than your average MP3 player firmware. For example, Rockbox supports 15 sound formats, you can play Doom on it (!!), it has tons of settings so you can tweak it to your heart’s desire, it has Doom, it has video support, and did I mention you can play Doom on your iPod?

Of course, with all these features Rockbox is quite a bit more complicated than your regular firmware, so it takes some getting used to. But once you figure out where everything is, and what all those strange settings do, you’ll find Rockbox to be quite awesome. Installation is very simple, just download the Rockbox Utility and run it (with your device plugged in, of course). But in case you don’t like Rockbox, you can usually uninstall it easily with the Rockbox Utility. (If worse comes to worst, there’s always the option of reformatting your device and doing a clean install of the original firmware.) Anyways, after installing Rockbox you might want to check out some themes, and after that you can use your new firmware (read: play Doom) to your heart’s content!

Now you have a nice, easy-on-the-eyes Windows XP desktop. If you don’t, then you either missed the first part of the guide or I just suck at writing guides. So anyways you have a pretty XP setup, but it’s still rather annoying and inconvenient sometimes. Here are some cool programs I found that give Windows XP a little usability boost. Note that there are oodles more programs like this out there; these are just the ones I liked the most.

1) a keystroke launcher

After using Gnome Do in Ubuntu, I can’t be happy in XP using an archaic menu-and-quicklaunch system. Gnome Do is a keystroke launcher; in English that means “typing, not clicking”. You press a keycombination to bring it up and then type in a search box to launch programs and open folders. This is much faster than using the mouse to navigate menus and folders (for me, anyhow).

For Windows I found Executor. This launcher has LOADS of features, and it’s extremely customizable. Normally it uses very little memory, but if you choose to index a big chunk of your hard drive it has a significant memory overhead — I have around 1600 files indexed for 21 mb memory. If you don’t find Executor to your liking, there are many other launchers like it out there.

2) general UI improvements

KatMouse - A great little program that allows you to mouse-wheel-scroll in whatever window is under the mouse, even if the window is not in focus. This is useful for when you’re doing something while reading a document or webpage and don’t want to keep switching between windows just to scroll down in the webpage/document, for example.

Taskbar Shuffle – Many Linux distros as well as Windows 7 give the user the ability to move taskbar items around the taskbar via drag-and-drop. With this program you can do it in XP too!

Winsplit Revolution – This one allows you to quickly lay out windows around the screen with hotkeys. This way you can view several windows at a time without having to move and resize them yourself. Winsplit Revolution can also set windows to stay on top, it can make windows semi-transparent, and it can get a screenshot of just the active window (although the screenshot function doesn’t work well for me).

allSnap – But most of the time I like resizing and moving windows myself, and this program makes it a snap! (Pun intended.) allSnap gives windows in Windows XP snapping capabilities. So when you’re moving or resizing a window, it’ll snap its position or size to other windows’ edges or the screen edges.

Everything – Ok, this one’s technically not a UI improvement, but I just have to include it here because it’s so awesome. It’s a replacement for the regular (slow) search in Explorer. Everything’s website sums it up in a few words: “Locate files and folders by name instantly.” And when they say instantly, they mean literally instantly. It automatically indexes all your files so that it has instant search-as-you-type.

All of these programs are small and use only a few megabytes of memory; Everything might be an exception because, of course, it will use more memory if you have more files. I have 163,000 files indexed in Everything and it uses up to 11 mb. Not bad if you ask me!

6) Explorer addons

QTTabBar – I’ve mentioned this one before, but I’ll just put it here so that it’s with the others. QTTabBar is like a supermod to Windows Explorer. The main feature, as you might have guessed, is tabbed browsing. I’ve found that tab functionality in Explorer isn’t as useful as I thought it would be, but it is useful sometimes. QTTabBar adds lots of other nice features too, like a custom set of toolbar buttons for Explorer (including a “keep window on top” button and an integrated search box), image previews in Explorer and the ability to reopen recently closed windows and tabs. There are several plugins for QTTabBar, see the list here.

QTAddressBar – As you might have guessed, this one’s made by the same people as QTTabBar. It replaces XP’s address bar with a Vista-style breadcrumbs address bar. Below you can see Explorer with QTAddressBar and QTTabBar, including the new toolbar buttons.

Of course, you don’t have to use QTAddressBar with QTTabBar if you prefer the standard XP address bar. Here’s an alternate layout using only the standard address bar and QTTabBar, with the toolbar buttons hidden. To remove the menu bar simply press Alt-M with QTTabBar open. To remove the throbber (the little picture in the top right corner), see the instructions here.

TeraCopy – A replacement for Explorer’s file-moving function. I’ve been frustrated quite a bit by Explorer when it comes to moving files. Typical scenario: I’m moving lots of files totaling to over 100 gb from one hard drive to another, then there’s some kind of error, and then Explorer just cancels the entire transfer, forcing me to start over. Well, no more. With TeraCopy, if there’s an error it just skips over the problematic file and continues with the rest of the transfer. Plus, you can pause transfers, skip over files, and see detailed information about a transfer. And TeraCopy is faster than Explorer’s file-mover (I haven’t done any tests though, so you’ll have to take their word for it).

Folder Size – This tiny addon makes Explorer show sizes for folders as well as files in Detail view, under a new column. Before I found this I was always bugged by the fact that Explorer only showed the sizes of files and not folders.

I found some of these in Lifehacker’s list of Explorer addons. There are other cool addons in that list, but I left out some of them because they wouldn’t be so useful if you’re using a launcher like Executor.

And that’s the end of Windows XP revamp… for now. I hope you’ll enjoy these programs and themes as much as I do! If you have any questions, suggestions, criticisms, etc., be sure to leave me a comment.

-fipi

Truth be told, I’d love to have Windows 7 once it’s released. It has the nice looks of Vista plus some slick interface improvements. But alas, I’ll only get a new computer next year, so that’ll have to wait. In the meantime I’m making my XP desktop nicer. There are a lot of things in XP that are less than satisfactory, both in looks and in usability. So I’ve improved on some of these, and I now I’ll tell you what I learned.

And yes, I realize this is pretty late to still be writing about XP, but whatever. AND, in addition to my nonchalant “whatever”, I just learned that apparently XP users are in the majority… SO TAKE THAT!

1) a new theme

transformation packs. I’ll get this out of the way first: if you’re simply looking to make your Windows XP look like Vista or Seven, instead of having fun customizing everything yourself, then the easiest thing is to get a transformation pack. There are several of these out there, but here are a couple that look good: Vista Transformation Pack, Seven Transformation Pack .

{ Windows 7 transformation pack }

But use these at your own risk, because by modifying your system like this Something Bad could happen… and I haven’t tried them myself so I can’t say whether or not they work, but since they’re so popular I’m assuming they do. Also keep in mind that these transformation packs might slow down your system if you have an older computer.

Microsoft themes. There are a few themes made by Microsoft that are pretty popular, the biggest being the Royale family of themes. These are kind of like XP’s Luna themes, but shinier and better-looking. After you install one of these via an .msi or .exe file, it will be available in the Display Properties (select Properties under the desktop right-click menu).

Royale Remixed is an awesome rework of the original themes. It includes all 3 Royale themes as color schemes: Royale (light blue), Royale Noir (dark blue), and Royale Zune (black). This theme is more complete and (in my opinion) way better than the originals, but if you want you can still get the original Royale, Royale Noir, and Royale Zune themes.

{ Royale Remixed Zune }

Unlike most themes, Royale Remixed includes shutdown and log off graphics, but they have to be installed manually. See the included readme for instructions.

custom themes. Most themes aren’t made by Microsoft. In fact, you’ll find thousands upon thousands of these custom themes. There’s great collection of these here, and more here. DeviantART has a ton of themes.

To install these non-Microsoft themes, just download the Uxtheme patcher and run it. Don’t worry about a message box that might pop up, just click “Continue”. Then put your new themes in C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes. Now they might be available in the Display Properties, under the Appearance tab. If not, open the .msstyles files in the Themes folder.

{ Silence theme }

In case you use Google Chrome. As of June 2009, I don’t think there are any official themes for Chrome besides the default blue. This isn’t a problem for Vista and Windows Seven (I assume), because in these Chrome uses the Aero theme. But in XP, light blue is seemingly the only option. Once again I put on my google goggles and discovered that the seeming reality was in fact… a lie! I found Chrome Plugins, a website with unofficial plugins for Chrome, including some themes. Not many though… If anyone has a good source for Chrome plugins, please comment and tell me!

{ black Aero theme for Chrome }

2) get Stylish

Styler is a program that allows you to customize the Explorer toolbar by applying themes. DeviantART has a whole section devoted to these themes, and many visual themes you’ll find at deviantART come with a matching Styler theme.

{ OSX Tiger toolbar theme }

Here is a good tutorial to get you started, using a Vista toolbar theme as an example. You can have some sweet toolbars with Styler, but personally I don’t use it (I’ll tell you why in part 2).

3) cool mouse cursors

{ Entis cursor set }

Here’s pretty good mouse cursor collection. DeviantART also has lots of cursor sets, here. To use new cursors, just go to Control Panel -> Mouse -> Pointers, and then load the cursors. Not much to be said about cursors…

4) nicer icons

To customize your desktop icons, grab the freeware app IconTweaker. Then get some icons in DeviantART’s icon section or take a look at this great collection (thanks again instant fundas!).

{ Vista icons applied in IconTweaker }

Usually icon sets are packaged as individual icon files, so it’s kind of a pain to install them because you have to load each one individually. Fortunately, IconTweaker can load pre-packaged icon sets. Unfortunately, these aren’t very common. But I found a few of these packaged sets here and some more here. Also, at deviantART there are some nice Vista and OSX IconTweaker packages.

That’s it for visuals! A special thanks to all the artists on deviantART who make these amazing themes and icons and whatnot. Also a big thanks to the website instant fundas for making some great theme collections and for being the first one to show me (via Google search) that there is a bigger, more beautiful world beyond default XP themes. If you have any suggestions, corrections, or angry rants, drop me a comment. Here’s one last screenshot (click to expand).

-fipi

up next: UI improvements

I’m pretty new to open source games, but here are 5 of those rare, addiction-inducing open source games that I’ve found, in no particular order. All of these games are available for Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. Fun for everyone! If you want to keep up with what goes on in open source gaming, be sure to check out the excellent blog Free Gamer.

Frets on Fire X

First up is Frets on Fire X (a.k.a. FoFiX), a music game similar to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and a pretty darn good one too. If you have Guitar Hero or Rock Band you can load those songs into FoFiX, but even better is the fact that you can get thousands of custom songs, charted by players. Don’t have a guitar to plug into your computer? That’s ok, you can hold your keyboard guitar-style and play with the keyboard! (But an actual guitar is easier, especially on the harder songs.) FoFiX is based on the regular Frets on Fire but adds lots of features. Custom songs can be found in the wiki. You’ll also want to get a nicer theme, here.

{FoFiX with the Modern Grunge theme}

Battle for Wesnoth

This was the first open source game I really liked. Ah, the memories. Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with some RPG elements mixed in. Unlike most turn-based strategy games, you don’t have to spend hours learning the rules. It’s easy to learn, but surprisingly hard to master. There are several great single player campaigns, as well as online play. The 2d artwork and music are excellent. That’s the power of open source, right there.

{it has mages with lightning powers, 'nuff said}

The Ur-Quan Masters

The Ur-Quan Masters, or UQM for short, is a port of the old game Star Control II. It’s hard to categorize this one… Wikipedia says it’s a sci-fi action RPG, so I’ll go with that. In a nutshell, you’re the captain of a starship and your goal is to liberate the galaxy from its evil alien overlords. There are so many interesting things to do, so many stories to uncover, and so many funny things to see that you’ll get sucked into the game with no hope of escape until the galaxy is saved. Although the single player story mode is the main part of UQM, there’s also the option of playing online battles.

{you'll meet some *interesting* characters throughout your journeys}

Nexuiz

If you like hectic first-person shooters, Nexuiz is your game. It started out as a Quake mod, but now it’s a standalone game. Plenty of weapons, lots of maps, lots of blood, online play… everything that’s necessary for total pwnage. There’s also a single player mode with bots, so you can learn your way around the game without being humiliated in public.

{big guns and explosions!}

UFO: Alien Invasion

Here’s another turn-based strategy game, but this time on the tactical level. In UFO: Alien Invasion’s single player campaign, aliens are attacking Earth, and your job is to lead a team of soldiers in battles against the aliens. As you fight more aliens, you can research new technology and build more bases around the world. You might notice some missing features… yes, it’s still a work in progress, but a great game nonetheless. There’s also online play.

{taking care of those pesky aliens}

It took three days and lots of failure and frustration to make my desktop look just right. It was worth it. ^^

There it is. (That stuff in the bottom right is Impulse, a sound visualization screenlet. Beauty in its purest form.)

1. cool effects

This one’s simple, but I’ll mention it just for the sake of completeness. To get nice effects and eye candy, open up the CompizConfig Settings Manager (under Preferences in the menu) and configure away. But first you have to enable your proprietary video driver, under Administration > Hardware Drivers.

2. a nicer theme

GTK themes are the basic themes in Gnome. You can find tons at GNOME-Look.org. If you’re like me at first you might wonder, “How the heck do I apply this theme??” After you download it, go the Appearance preferences and go the Theme tab. Then just drag your new theme file into the Appearance window, and presto! You’ve got a new theme.

One annoyance I encountered is that Synaptic and other applications that are run as the root user look terrible and don’t use new GTK themes. To change this, run these commands in a terminal, then restart any root applications that are open.
sudo ln -sf /home/<username>/.icons /root/.icons
sudo ln -sf /home/<username>/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -sf /home/<username>/.fonts /root/.fonts

Emerald themes, which can be found at Compiz-Themes.org, provide window border decorations like shiny title bars. But first you need the Emerald Theme Manager. You can get it in Synaptic, and then after you install it open up a terminal and run emerald —-replace. Note that you still need a GTK theme for the inside of windows. The key is finding Emerald and GTK themes that fit well together.

Icon sets can also be found at GNOME-Look. Like GTK themes, to apply them just drag them into the Appearance window.

Mouse cursor themes are a little harder to set up sometimes. The way it’s supposed to work, you just drag a downloaded cursor theme into the Appearance window, click Customize, go to the Pointers tab, and choose your desired pointer theme. In the best cases, you do this, re-login, and your new cursor theme works. In the worst cases, dragging a file into the Appearance window doesn’t install the cursor theme. If this is the case, you have to install it manually. Here’s how:

First, extract your theme file. Then move the extracted folder to /home/<username>/.icons. Now try choosing that theme in the Appearance preferences (in the Pointer tab in the Customize window). If it’s there, select it, close, and re-login. If it’s not there, run gconf-editor in a terminal. For these two keys, enter the name of your desired theme: /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme, and /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/cursor_theme. Now re-login. Hopefully you’re new theme works now, but if not, contact you’re nearest Linux guru and plead for assistance.

Finishing touches. Finally, get a nice desktop background to complement your sweet new theme. And a Firefox theme to match it too, if you use Firefox. (Ironically, the FF theme that fit my desktop the best was a Vista-like theme.)

3. a stylish dock bar

Want to use a cool-looking dock bar instead of boring panels? It’s easy!

Avant Window Navigator and Cairo Dock are the most popular “normal” docks. These are the traditional, drag-your-shortcuts-there dock bars, and they also have cool widgets, and they show open windows like in the bottom panel. They’re not perfect, and each has its strengths and weaknesses, so you’ll have to try both to see which you like better. Both are available in the repositories (Synaptic).

Docky is a different kind of dock. It’s part of Gnome Do, an awesome search/launcher program that allows you to do stuff  really fast with the keyboard. Docky is simply a dock interface for Do that shows any windows you’re running and optionally your most-used programs.

Want to make the Gnome panels autohide? Open up gconf-editor, find your panel(s) under /apps/panel, and then turn on and tweak autohiding. There is one little problem though: the panel never hides completely even auto_hide_size set to 0. When the panel hides there remains a tiny thin line that bugs the heck out of some people (like me). That’s why I chose to…

…Remove all Gnome panels. For some reason Gnome doesn’t let you delete the last panel through the right-click menu, so again we’ll do a trick with gconf-editor. In gconf-editor, navigate to /desktop/gnome/session/required_components. Set the value of the “panel” key to blank. Then re-login and all your panels are gone! If you ever want your panels back just go to that key again and set its value to “gnome-panel”.

4. moar screenlets!

No, they’re not miniature screens. Screenlets are little apps that stay on your desktop. They can be anything from a music visualizer to system information displays to clocks. Like Google Gadgets or Yahoo Widgets. Before you go on a screenlet spree, you need to install the “screenlets” package, available in the standard repositories. After installing it, open up the Screenlet Manager to… wouldn’t you know… manage your screenlets. Many screenlets come pre-packaged, but if you want more (and I think you will), go the the Screenlets section at GNOME-Look, download the ones you want, and then in the Screenlets Manager add them via the Install button.

It takes a while to learn how to set up screenlets just right, and a lot of trial-and-error, but here’s a tip. If you like using the “show desktop” button/keyboard shortcut, you’ll run into a problem: by defualt all screenlets will minimize along with windows. That’s not good, screenlets are supposed to stay on your desktop! Again we will use gconf-editor. So open it up and navigate to /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options. Uncheck hide_skip_taskbar_windows. Now your screenlets won’t minimize anymore.

Another tip: if you want screenlets visible alongside windows all the time, put your screenlets in a sidebar screenlet. Then set the sidebar’s alignment to one that says “Reserved”. Note that as of May 2009 there is a bug with this alignment; whenever you move, edit, or add screenlets in the sidebar, they get pushed out of the sidebar. So you have to set it to a regular alignment, do your stuff, and finally set it to reserved again.

epilogue

I hope whoever reads this (if anyone) learns something. If not, I still have a nice set of notes for myself for the future.

[poetic mode activated] May you enjoy the newfound sweetness wafting to your eyes, may your life be spent in blissful beauty, and may your powers of desktop-customizing be always used for good, never for evil… [unless they give you cookies. Then it's okay.]

-fipi

edit: I tried it, and it’s awesome. No problems at all so far, and it works just like the Windows tracker except for the lack of web tracking for now.

NOTE: I use the addons/improvements I list below for Windows XP, but I think all except #5 and maybe #6 work in Vista too. edit: I read in some places that #5 (Ext2Fsd) does indeed work in Vista, but it may require some tweaking. I don’t know what kind of tweaking, so you’ll just have to try it out yourself. If it doesn’t work, try Ext2 IFS, a similar program that says it supports Vista.

I like Windows XP, mostly because I don’t have money to buy Vista. XP works alright, but after using Linux (Mint and Ubuntu) there are just a few really useful features that I miss. XP also looks pretty bad compared to newer operating systems. So here are some nice improvements I’ve found. These are best for people who use Linux as well as Windows, but most of these are useful even if you don’t use Linux.

1) QTTabBar adds tabs to Windows Explorer, as well as a new row of buttons to replace the standard Explorer ones. Very customizable, and also works in Vista.

2) This tutorial explains how to add a command prompt button to the Windows Explorer right-click menu, similar to the “Open in Terminal” button in Ubuntu.

3) Create keyboard shortcuts to open folders and to run programs.

4) If you want to change where your “My Documents” folder is, just right click on its start menu entry, go to Properties, and change the target location. Very useful if all your stuff is in your Linux partition (or just any other partition) and you want your “My Documents” links to point to there.

5) But if you want to access your Linux partition in the first place (assuming it’s ext2/ext3[/ext4?]), you need Ext2Fsd. This very useful program allows you to mount an ext partition as a drive in Windows. This way I can keep all my “stuff” (music, games, movies, etc) only in my Linux partition, and I can access it and even write to it while in XP. edit: As I said above, if Ext2Fsd doesn’t work, try Ext2 IFS.

6) Finally, the nice looks. This page has lots of cool themes for Windows XP, and also links to pages with nice icon sets and mouse cursors. There are Minimalist themes, Vista-like themes, Mac themes, dark themes, even a couple of Ubuntu/Gnome themes. Don’t forget to read the instructions at the bottom of the page!

As for a desktop background, I just discovered that MilkDrop (a visualization plugin in the music players WinAmp and MediaMonkey) has a Desktop Mode, where the visualization runs as a desktop background. It’s not very useful, but it’s just so cool.

Now I can do stuff faster in Windows XP, it’s nicely integrated with Ubuntu, and my eyes are much happier.

Here’s the solution I found. Open a terminal and run this command: sudo chmod 777 [path] -R, where [path] is your locked folder or file. In my case I did sudo chmod 777 /home/fipi/Stuff -R, and viola, now I can delete, create, and move files to my heart’s content.