Well, with a new forum comes the need for a new desktop screenshot thread, and since I have not posted one since December, here is my current entry for February:



As you can see, I am now running Arch Linux on my machine rather than Fedora. I recently got the hardware in my computer almost completely replaced (my old stuff being given instead to our HTPC), with me getting myself a new motherboard, a new quad-core cpu, and of course a new stick of memory, and as Fedora 16 had by then finally reached it's end of life I seriously needed to get my machine upgraded to something new.

If anyone is interested, here are my up to date specs:

QuoteDistribution: Arch Linux
Graphics Driver: R600 Gallium3D Driver
Desktop Environment: Xfce with composting
Motherboard: MSI 760GM-E51(FX)
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE 3.2 Ghz
Video Card: Diamond AMD Radeon HD 4670
Memory: 4 Gigabytes DDR3 PC10666, 1333 MHz
Hard Drive: 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Green

Fedora 18 was not accepting my Zaphod Head configuration for some reason, and since I got my two terabyte drive copying all the files off of it for a clean install has been an utter pain (I know I could in theory just wipe the root partition, but I would still want to have my files backed up in case something went wrong anyway) so I decided it might be time for me to give a rolling release distribution a try. Since I had already been consulting it's Wiki for years, I settled on Arch. I still like Fedora of course and I am still going to end up using it quite a bit on my network's other machines, but so far Arch is working out well for me, even if I spent the first few days meticulously setting it up to act almost exactly like one of my Fedora machines would (which is all part of the fun of Arch of course).

I am especially enjoying all of the video game source ports I can grab from AUR; all of the application icons on the top of my screen are for things I have grabbed and built from AUR. I have been playing with Doomsday again for instance, which I have not touched since back when I was forced to use Windows XP almost a decade ago, so it is fun to see it in action again. I also have Chocolate Doom installed as well for when I am feeling a little more conservative, as well as the standard selections of darkplaces, yamagi, and ioquake3 for the various Quake titles. WINE is also working a lot better for me now with Arch, giving me working sound and allowing me to play through Blood II again now that is actually running through Direct3D at a decent performance. Several native titles are also running better, especially Trine 2 which now seems to fly on my box, much to my surprise. Even Dosbox is enjoying being able to utilize all four of my cores properly.

So, thumbs up and smiles all round. ^_^