John's Computer Journal

The Clearlooks theme engine for GTK+ is a great alternative to the wimp theme engine. Because Vista introduces some bugs into the wimp engine, I've taken a look at compiling Clearlooks for use on Windows. MinGW compiles Clearlook's code without any problems on Vista.

For those who don't have the GTK+ toolchain setup I've attached the binary compilation of Clearlooks 0.6.2 for windows. I've packed the binaries into an Installer that should put everything into the correct location. If the installer doesn't work like it should, just unzip the executable and copy all the files within the Files directory into the root of the GTK 2.0 directory.

The Installer creates a backup of the current GTK+ theme configuration, so upon uninstalling the Clearlooks theme GTK+ will switch back to the previous configuration. Any GTK+ applications will have to be restarted before theme changes take place.

Download

• ClearLooks-Win32.zip

References

• Clearlooks

Vista's Aero interface messes with VLC's ability to playback some videos on default settings. The video settings must be changed manually to DirectX video output. In VLC:

1. Select the Settings -> Preferences menu.
2. Expand the Video Section (click the plus next to video) and select Output modules
3. Check the Advanced options box and select DirectX video output.
4. Click Save and restart VLC.

Unfortunately, setting the output to DirectX will cause windows to disable Aero when playing back videos. The Windows GDI setting will avoid this, but won't have the hardware acceleration of DirectX and can't select menu items on DVDs. DirectX 3D will work for DVDs, but only for certain videos.

References

• VLC Media Player Problem under Vista

I am currently running a MyHD 100 card on Windows Vista without disabling the security features in Vista. The following is a list of steps and hints that can serve as a guide and reference.

Installation

1. Download the latest driver. The latest driver can be found either on Digital Connection or on the AVS Forum.
2. Install the driver using Windows XP compatibility mode.
3. Set both the MyIRC and MyHD executables to run in Windows XP compatibility mode and as an administrator.

Annoyances

• The MyIRC executable must be explicitly allowed to run every time the computer starts.
• Time Shifting must be manually enabled. See the issue below.

Issues

1. Do not enable "Full Time Shift." Enabling the Full Time Shift function will cause either an error message or a massive memory leak.
2. The drivers (1.66.1) I used do not properly support hibernate and suspend in Vista. Make sure to not use suspend or hibernate or the system will blue screen and reboot. Disable suspend in the power control panel.
3. Some functionality may not work as expected. It has been noted both on Digital Connection's MyHD FAQ and the MyHD FAQ on the AVS Forum that the DVD player and other functionality is disabled by the myHD program with Dual-Processor (DP)/HyperThreading (HT) (no matter what OS). The FAQ on the AVS Forum suggests disabling a processor/core or hyperthreading from either the bios or Windows boot.ini. Simply setting the process affinity will not work because the MyHD program specifically checks if the processor is DP or HT enabled. It may be possible to hack the binary to disable the DP and HT checking.