Speedup Desktop Environment

Hey,

one of the last post I was wondering what made my system idle for 3 sec before finishing boot. I think I've found. I asked Sherlock Holmes and he revealed me the truth. So let's take the chance and find the best way to get a responsive and fast environment.

First of all unless you have a good dedicated graphic card I suggest to forget about compiz and other beautiful but useless beautifiers. I even suggest Xfce which is very light fast and reliable. This means that Gnome and KDE are good if you want a cool look, but not always the best choice.

In my case I have an Integrated Intel Graphics, so I have to do without compiz, I love very minimalist desktops, so decided to do without compiz, without KDE and without Gnome, just Xfce, and an even lighter panel manager, tint2.

Wicd: customizing networks configuration

Hey,

As a good Xfce user I know some gnome-kde alternative applications. One of the best of this crew is certainly Wicd, a Network manager. First of all it handles wired and wireless networks in a cute graphical environment, but most important it works flawlessly with many wireless cards and chipset, has a ndiswrapper support and it is relatevely easy to open a backdoor and create your profile as you need.

I mean if you have a strange wifi setup due to your system admin at work or internet provider at home, or a reserved wifi connection in your university campus, you can create a simple text file to send required parameters to wifi-supplicant wich still does its job.