Thou too....Ubuntu!!!

Well, I have been using Ubuntu since the introduction of Dapper. I have been very very happy with it(infact I was proud like a peacock to be a Ubuntite and would show off my Ubuntu to people!), and had never thought that I'd have to give it up EVER, but today I am thinking otherwise.
We, some die-hard Ubuntu fans from India , had started off a website (with chief focus on providing support through forums) called www.ubuntuforums.info
It is of course a totally non-official, non-profit venture. The official Ubuntu India site exists proudly at www.ubuntu-in.org . We had been going strong with our UNOFFICIAL forums, untill yesterday. The owner of our forums, informed me online that we might have to close down our UNOFFICIAL forums. I was naturally devastated and asked why. In reply, he said that some 'official person' from the Ubuntu Project (who also happens to be a leader in the OFFICIAL ubuntu-in.org site) had contacted him and accused him of things:
1) We were using the Ubuntu LOGO & the text "ubuntu india" and we were NOT an official site endorsed by Canonical, unlike thier ubuntu-in.org. Also, our usage of those copyrighted materials "cannot be considered as 'fair use'".
2) We were " trying to illegally copy what ubuntuforums.org is and does"

From what the official guy had to say, it seemed that we unofficial guys had 3 options :
1) Close down our site altogether
or
2) Merge with their official ubuntu-in.org as subordinates
or
3) FACE THE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES

I understand that this official guy is perfectly within legal rights to say all these (just like M$ is perfectly within thier legal rights to take action against anybody violating their copyrights) and that we should have read the policy statements very very carefully (just like we should read the EULA and other such license agrrements in M$). I dont hold any grievance/grudge against anybody. in fact, I am profusely apologizing to anyone and everyone concerned, for not being vigilant enough with the copyright issues!

Its just that I am very hurt. I am reminded of why I dumped Windows. It was NOT a technical reason. But just that I value my freedom and consequently cannot bear to keep using something which threatens me of having breached a law or the other at every step!
I just hoped Ubuntu , with its motto ' Linux for HUMAN beings" would be a bit lineant /considerate by placing a few human virtues above legal strictness! IMHO, we were not doing any CRIME at our unofficial forums like maligning Canonical or Ubuntu in any way! It was just that we tried to promote our beloved distro in our own unofficial way!
But now it seems we have to end our 'criminal' activities! The owner of our site(one of the most passionate Ubuntu enthusiast I have seen...in fact, he ran our site out of his meager pocket-money as a student ) has been very down on his morale and has almost decided to shut down the site! Personally, I am not too good either.
I just request any visitor to this blog to visit both the above sites and do a comparative study. Also, please tell me what 'criminal' activities, acoording to you, has been underway at our site!!
Well, I am not going down on this as easily. I have already made a thread at the official ubuntuforums.org to inform my fellow Ubuntites from round the world about this, and now I am blogging this to similar effects. I have also thought of directly emailing Mark Shuttleoworth himself (He's the founder of Canonical which sponsors Ubuntu) .
Frankly, I had never thought we'd be in such a situation in the FREE world, where we are threatened to legal consequences on infringing some copyright issues while our intentions were far from being criminal!

Beryl/Aiglx on my Ubuntu Edgy

I had heard a lot about composite managers and the wonderful visual effects they can generate. I had attempted to try out Compiz with Xgl some time ago, when I was running Ubuntu Dapper on my box. It was an awful experience. I followed the official ubuntuforums.org guide to the core, but still couldn't really get it to work! Next I tried my luck with Aiglx too (since someone mentioned that it is more suited to my Intel on board card), but the results were the same. So, I had dropped down the idea of having all those beautiful eye-candies on my desktop!
However, of late, seeing some screenshots here and there, and listening to the happy users, my interest in composite managers was rekindled!! Moreover, I heard that Ubuntu Edgy (I had upgraded to it in the meanwhile) has Aiglx support inbuilt into the Xorg that ships with it!! This raised my hopes, because previously, installing Xgl or Aiglx was where it had all gone wrong! However, I still had a problem. I remembered the one(and only one!) time I got Xgl/Compiz to run on my Dapper, it had been awfully slow! And I have a pretty low memory(256 MB RAM...and that too fails MEMTEST...so in effect it is much lower still!). I tried to google around hoping to find the minimum requirements to run composites, but didn't really find anything useful.
Finally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I said "What the heck, let's give it a try! If it comes to that, I can always reinstall!" (I happen to have my /home on a separate partition, so reinstalling is achievable without losing personal data). So, I backed up my /cache/apt/archives using the wonderful tool AptOnCD (I must write something about this tool sometime), and gave it a go!
This time too, I followed the 'Official' guide here !
I had to tweak my xorg.conf file only a little bit, and then just add the Beryl repositories and install beryl & the emerald themes. (Beryl, of course is the Edgy replacement of Compiz composite-manager from Dapper).
Once done, I crossed my fingers and fired it up by typing 'beryl-manager' at a terminal. And know what, it actually worked the very first time!! The wobbly Beryl splash-image showed up....and soon my window borders changed!! Gone was the 'boring' ol' Metacity, and in its place was a beautiful looking transparent window border. And of course the wobbly windows while moving them around! I have installed it the day before yesterday and have been playing around with the various settings(Beryl manager) and themes(Emerald manager) since then . I have set up various animations for different actions...e.g. when I close a window, it 'burns' down with smokes, while a newly created window comes swirling in!! As for performance, there is hardly any hint of things getting slow, even on my low RAM! In fact, I'd say it gives a 'feel-fast' air to my desktop!! And bugs?? Well, I know that Beryl is still a Beta version and it's quite normal to have some bugs crop up their ugly heads, etc etc...but the 2-3 days I am using it, Beryl hasn't crashed a single time!! Maybe I'm just lucky to have both the installation and post-installation running so smooth!!
Mere screenshots certainly wont do any justice in telling how wonderful this new toy is...still you can have a look at my current desktop. What I really like is the 3D effect it gives with shadows and all (the beautiful wallpaper adds to the effect too), and of course the real transparent effects!!
If you have been a die-hard linux fan, but still been allured of late by the eye-candies proposed by M$ Vista....this is great news for you! First of all,Vista is a huge memory-hogg & won't run on low end machines like mine(besides of course the other common drawbacks of M$), but Beryl/Aiglx certainly does, and coupled with a few add-ons like Gdesklets, it is ready to take on Vista (or anything else) on visual grounds atleast!
People who still think that Linux is ugly, must have never looked out of their 'WINDOWS' to the 'OPEN' world outside!! ;-)