[ale] Cool X setups

[Daniel Newcombe]

> Ok, I have a really silly question.  See, a while back I got to play with
> a little Indy for a bit, and the guy who ran it had a window hooked up to
> the camera, and it looked, well......like a _real_ computer.  And then, I

They're addictive aren't they.

> saw 'Twister', and there was this great SGI laptop that was just so damn
> cool....so, what I want, is I want _my_ computer to look like that.

I want my computer to be able to generate tornado images like that - 
or at least pictures of Helen Hunt.  Anyway, it looked like the SGI 
laptop was running Motif and not the SGI 4dwm window manager.  Doesn't
matter much - mwm with the right settings looks like an SGI I'm sure.
(At least the buttons and menu titles)
 
> Ok, sure, what difference does _look_ make?  I mean really, it's all

A lot...if you feel happier working on your computer, it'll be more 
productive.  One of the reasons I avoid Macs is because I think the 
interface is butt ugly.

> 1)  Does anyone know what it would take (hardware and software) to get a
> camera hooked up in an Xwindow?  Or maybe some live video from NASA?  Or

To do this all you need is a supported video capture method.  There 
are drivers and programs for pulling video in under X.  You just need 
the camera, and a video capture card of some sort.

> 2)  Is there a way to get fvwm to REALLY look like mwm?   mwm is such a 
> hog, but I'm hooked on the look.  

fvwm really looks like Motif to me.  (Then again, I don't care much 
for Motif, so it looks close enuff for me.)  The problem that you are 
going to run into is without Motif, and apps using Motif, all you are 
getting is the Window manager look.   Your apps will still look like 
Xt, Openview, Xaw, or whatever they were coded in.  So it doesn't 
matter if you have Motif, or a really good fvwm setup - all the 
buttons and menus will still correspond to whatever widget set they 
were written with.    One thing you can do to help with this is to 
install Xaw3d, which gives Xaw apps a 3-d look, and with the right 
resource settings, they look more like Motif apps. 

> 3)  Any thing else I can do to make my cute little Linux box look more 
> professional?  More like a grown-up unix?

Buy Motif, use only motif apps.  Yeah, it'll suck up resources, but 
even the Motif editor looks better than Xedit by a long shot.


I'm willing to setup on my web server images of peoples desktops and 
how they were configured to get that way.  Just send me an image of 
your desktop and whatever info about how you got it that way, and 
I'll put it out there.  Almost any format is fine...preferably tared 
and gziped, then uuencoded.  Images preferably in gif or jpg, though 
xwd's will be handled.

    -Dan

Dan Newcombe
User Services
newcombe at aa.csc.peachnet.edu
"Huh-huh"