Matt Schmandt

I recently needed to find where all the disk space had gone on a Windows server.  I remembered Steve Gibson mentioning some products on Security Now.  He recommended using Space Monger.  This software scans a drive and gives you a visual representation of where your disk space is.  It allows you to zoom into any folder for more information.

Version 2.x is now a premium product but version 1.4 is still free.  The 1.4 UI looks old but it still does a great job.  The download is small and the exe doesn’t require installation.  I highly recommend using this tool if anyone needs to find where all your disk space went on a Windows machine.

On the Linux side there are 2 tools that do similar things.  Gnome has included a tool called Disk Usage Analyzer and KDE has the tool built into Konqueror.

I have been using Beryl for about two months. Beryl adds OpenGL effects to the desktop; similar to Areo Glass on Vista. From what I have seen in Vista, Microsoft keeps the effects to a minimium. Beryl effects are much more aggresive and very noticable. Beryl does not add any productivity value to the computer but it makes it look much nicer.

Beryl runs well on my laptop and other slower CPU machines. Most of the processing is done on the video card instead of the processor so it does not pull resources away from the CPU. There are many demo videos on YouTube showing Beryl. Here is a good one that shows many of the effects.

The only issue I have been having with Beryl is that it does not yet support two monitors. My main workstation has two monitors and anytime I enable Beryl on it, I get unpredictable results. Every time it is unusable. I typically have to log in on a terminal and kill any Beryl related process to make my desktop usable again. Other than that it works great and I recommend you try it out.

Here is a link to the install guide for Beryl on Gentoo.

Two nights ago The Tech Show had Dan Dennedy, a developer of Kino on. Kino is easy video editing software for Linux. It was made to compete with Apple’s iMovie and Microsoft’s Movie Maker. Kino released version 1.0 about three months ago and has been getting large amounts of press lately. I think this is a great piece of software for Linux desktop users because of its ease of use. Now that 1.0 has been released, Dan said he is going to focus on documentation. His personal goal is to post 2 screencast demos per month.

I installed it to review the interface and menu options. I didn’t really do much with it because I don’t own a camcorder, so I don’t have any home videos to edit. Perhaps in the future I will borrow my parent’s camcorder or just edit some downloaded videos.

The only downside I have heard about is that on Debian based systems the install can get in dependency loops. This can be very frustrating to a user. However, Dan Dennedy said he has posted some instructions to help users through this issue on the Kino website. Kino is very easy to install on Gentoo. The command to install it is “emerge -av kino” and it installed without any issues.

After listening to the hosts on the Linux Linc Tech Show always talking about XFCE, I decided to try it. It is much lighter weight than Gnome and KDE but still has more than Fluxbox.

I following the instructions posted on the Gentoo Wiki for installing XFCE. I installed XFCE 4.2.3.2 on my work laptop and have been very happy with it. It really seems like a good balance between features and speed. I have been running it for over a week and plan on continuing to use it.