While wandering around Compiz-Fusion forums, I just came across this really neat (and kickass) plugin which surprisingly hasn’t yet made it into the mainstream packages. Titled Freewins, it allows you amazing control over shape and positioning of individual windows. Don’t get what I’m saying? Check this out:

Link	Playable by	Resolution	Size
Freewins.mp4	iPod, QuickTime, MPlayer, VLC Media Player	320×240	468 KB

Each and every window can now easily be scaled as well as rotated around horizontal and vertical axes. You can now place your windows on top of each other like an actual physical stack when you don’t need them. You can transform your pictures and videos along an axis with the click of a button. Heck, you can even cure cancer with eye-candy like this — or so I’ve heard.

“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” — Khalil Gibran

The idea of visualizing the history of Microsoft on four sides of a desktop cube does sound enthralling no matter how much you despise the company’s products. That’s precisely the reason why I spent a whole night trying to configure four different operating systems to run virtualized on QEMU/KVM with networking and multimedia capabilities. The results look good, especially when you have a compositing window manager to extrapolate their effects.

Download the podcast (MP4)

 
Video screenshots

Hardware Information

Software Information

Note: Windows 98 and 95 don’t like KVM at all, so I had to run their respective virtual machines with the -no-kvm switch.

Here’s my first attempt at podcasting a video of the kick-ass hardware accelerated window manager:

Download the podcast (MP4)

Beryl’s own capture plugin was painfully slow, so I had to capture the video with my Nokia N72. The clip lasts for about a minute, but shows plenty of effects to achieve the ‘wow’ factor (most notably, the toying with the x11 output of MPlayer video).