According to Wikipedia A hybrids are mythological creatures combining body parts of more than one real species. They can be classified as partly human hybrids (such as mermaids or centaurs), and non-human hybrids combining two or more animal species (such as the griffin). Hybrids are often zoomorphic deities in origin who acquire an anthropomorphic aspect over time.
Now this article is not that much about mermaids or Centaurs, but more about operating systems. This morning (even before we dashed out for our morning walk) I dove down into my underground laboratory for some state of the art gene-splicing. Crossbreeding operating systems was not an easy task to do but by the time my second cappuchino had been consumed I was ready to storm out of my laboratory yelling ‘ ITS ALIVE ‘ while holding my notebook skyward. But seriously. Here is what really happened. Yesterday I was complaining on twitter that I missed my Macbook Pro (its still in the shop for repairs) and one of my cool buddies TECHANDLIFE ( www.techandlife.com ) shot me a Tweet with a howto on turning your Ubuntu into an OSX look-and-feel machine using THIS howto. The manual explains how to download the Mac4lin package to provide your Ubuntu install with the needed theme, icons and mouse pointers to give it an "Mac look and feel" But it goes a little further by using packages that are available in Linux like Screenlets and Compiz to turn your machine into something that realy feels like a mac.
But you know me ! 🙂 Why stop at an imitation if you can go even further. So I have spent the remains of my morning tinkering and tuning with the Screenlet ‘widgets’ and the various compis-fusion settings to go beyond the " design limitations " provided by this manual. So right now I have a machine that could hardly be named "a ubuntu box" any more. Neither would it answer the call if you called it an OSX. Its kind of something in-between , and it runs on my Work-Dell machine (A D820 with a screen res of 1900 by 1200 !). In true form result is a little more then the sum of just its parts. Its a hybrid, no a "sinergy" of the power of an intell based computer (that is designed to run XP) an open source operating system (ubuntu), the OSX look and feel interface and the addition of the standard ‘web technology’ that I use everyday (Twitter, Firefox, Gmail, etc etc). A very nice experiment indeed.
So if you want to go and try it out : Use the manual , but please : Don’t stop there. Go beyond and build your own little operating environment and become a cross-platform user in the true sense of the word. Who ever said that operating systems needed to differ in look, feel and mode of operation ? Fire up the creative furnice of your imagination and create your own melting pot of