What Do You Do If You Are Stuck Running A Windows Network?

[alexander]

Being a Linux guy, it is really hard to administer a Windows network, and the hardness does not come from not knowing the tools, oh no, they are easy, the hardness is in the fact that you are stuck at work, running windows all day long. That peeves me, so i have to work on ways of making my windows box look and feel a bit more like what i like to administer, so here's what i am working towards here

I am running blackbox for windows, i've followed the project, it does a lot of neat things, things that i miss as a Linux guy, like multiple desktops, menu when i click on the background, icons rather lack thereof Shortcut keys etc all great things to have when you HAVE to be in front of your workstation 90% of the time

I have also installed (and often use) Cygwin, though with blackbox here, i am going to make it my default terminal. Good bye the clunky dir and del, hello useable ls -lsah, ps, wget, grep and pipes, oh yes pipes, a thing which makes shell so damn powerful

So i am still working on my setup, i have to rework my menu quite a bit and define some shortcuts, but how do you "Own" your environment?

[GAHD]

http://www.spheresite.com/
Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD

Can you guess?

[alexander]

Yes i can, i make crazy BartPE CD's all the time, actually i am a really big fan of Ultimate Boot CD for Windows

But I am talking about nixifying windows (there are a few 3d desktop environments out there, but i dont see any actual use for them, other then resource hogging). I like a simple, minimalistic, user-definable experience that is tailored to my needs, hence why blackbox for windows

[GAHD]

ALEXANDER! Have you never seen Hackers? Don't you want the hot secretary to see and be mesmerized by the flashy 3D directory lists on your "Gibson" when she looks over your manly shoulders?

It'z nawt jus' aboot dooin tings, it'z about dooin them wit style...

[alexander]

Lol... no thanks :P

[Theory5]

Lol good idea, I would love to make a customized interface for windows to make it look cool and be much more useful. I have only dabbled in stuff with those clunky addon programs like windows blinds because I have no idea how to write my own interface :-)
Arn't there shells you can download and install for windows that changes the command-line interface?
Or have you tried writing your own linux program with LFS? I was trying to in school but when I had to download some needed packages their firewall blocked them and I kept forgetting to download them at home. :-)

[alexander]

I have done my fair share of Linux From Scratch things, but why would i want to write my own interface for it? Sure i have written a ton of code for Linux, including a lot of code to configure interfaces, for things like when you minimize a window it takes a snapshot, scales it and puts towards the bottom of the screen, code for chaning my background every 5 minutes, code for zooming windows around at the touch of some buttons and stuff like that for interfaces, like Blackbox, FVWM and XFCE, but not to create an interface, rather to customize one to my needs. With Linux there is a plethora of interfaces you can play with, 2d, 2d with cool 3d effects, 3d, 3d with cool effects, command driven, usable GUI, stripped, full to the brim with random programs, pre-configured to be useable, or here's our code, you make it look like what you want... Cool thing about even the most advanced linux interfaces with tons of effects, like Compiz-Fusion, is that they take little to no processor to run, the GPU at that not even any significant amount of one, runs most of the processing. Example: Vista runs horribly slow on a system with a 128 Meg graphics card and anything under 2 gigs of ram, on a slow dual core, Beryl (compiz fusion is a fusion of compiz and beryl) runs great on a system with a 64 Meg graphics card, 512 megs of ram and an amd 64 or a P4HT (with drivers that support hardware acceleration, i.e. most Nvidia cards) and does waaaay cooler things

with windows there's only the same old boring explorer that even with an aero interface still is hardly usable, hardly user-friendly, clustered with icons, and useless effects that eat up your processor and look like crap (for lack of a better term)....