Another post I thought was only going to be one line long, but it turned into a mini saga!
Sunday 06th June 2010
Monday 01st March 2010
Get it? CC cuddling cheese-kun? Warm and fuzzy? C? Get it? When I first started messing around with GNU ncurses I was under the impression it was a simple framework to create interactive, windowed console applications…
Sunday 31st January 2010
I was looking for something else entirely but came across two images from Code Geass that I’d never seen before. Looking at the fine print it references R3 Zero Requiem which I’m assuming is an OVA of some description. When I first learned all my anime terminology around 2005 I first thought OVA meant the show was… over! True story.
Tuesday 24th November 2009
A few days ago @Zombie_Plan of ZombieSkittles fame asked his Twitter followers to dispense ideas for a blog post he could write about. Having suggested an idea to him that was promptly ignored, I decided I may as well write about it myself :).
Tuesday 17th November 2009
While it wasn’t my favourite anime series in and of itself, Kallen Stadtfeld from Code Geass and Code Geass R2 is one of my favourite characters of all time. Perhaps it’s the whole double personality thing or the fact she could be a super duper underground figure while still being a sweet person. ^^;
Sunday 06th July 2008
What started as a mini series on the Xfce Desktop Environment on my university intranet has evolved into an open ended exploration on my public blog, and I’m having lots of fun doing it! Scroll down to the end of this post to view links to the previous posts in the series.
Part of the Xfce desktop environment is Xfwm, the Xfce window manager. Xfwm provides sophisticated and pretty composting effects such as drop shadows and alpha transparency on windows and menus, while still using less memory and power than competing desktop window managers. Despite this, for much slower machines even Xfwm can be overkill.
ASIDE: "Window managers" draw the widgets, title bars, resize handles and other elements onto application windows. "Desktop environments" such as KDE, GNOME and Xfce bundle their own window managers along with software developed specifically for their environments, such as Thunar for Xfce.
Enter Openbox, again! Openbox is an extensible, standards compliant, very minimalistic window manager that can be used by itself or in place of a desktop environment’s default window manager to further reduce memory and processor resources. The separate obconf utility provides a nice graphical control panel you can use to switch themes and adjust settings.
Openbox running in Xfce with the bundled "Mikachu" theme
Most reputable package managers carry both Openbox and obconf, check your distribution’s repositories. To install them on my favourite BSD flavours for example:
FreeBSD ports system or package
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/openbox && make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/obconf && make install clean
or:
# pkg_add -rv openbox
# pkg_add -rv obconfNetBSD pkgsrc
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wm/openbox && make install clean clean-depends
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/wm/obconf && make install clean clean-depends
Now we want to kill the active Xfwm process in Xfce and open our glorious Openbox replacement. Fire up your Terminal and enter:
% killall xfwm4 ; openbox & exit
It really is smaller in every sense of the word isn’t it? To make sure Openbox is used by default whenever you start Xfce, quit Xfce and check "Save sessions for future login".
Don’t worry, CC looks pretty confused herself!
You’ll also notice that the "Openbox Configuration Manager" has added itself to the Xfce Settings menu! Click on it and have fun with all the different themes, button positions, font sizes and arrangement settings.
Related posts
- Long live the Cobind Desktop 2008.06.21
- Fun with Xfce part 3: Themes 2008.06.18
- Fun with Xfce part 2: Setting up 2008.06.17
- Fun with Xfce part 1: Introduction 2008.06.15
- Sleek Openbox in KDE on FreeBSD 2008.03.19
Monday 19th May 2008
UPDATE: In fact I’m now trialling Xfce once again for my primary desktop because it satisfies all the criteria I outlined below as well as GNOME does, while being much more light weight.
It’s funny, I’m really only this fickle when it comes to software!
With a somewhat heavy heart and conscience I moved my primary desktop from KDE to GNOME this week.
Yes, that’s CC from Code Geass, the anime series Felix and I are watching!
While I think I still prefer KDE as a desktop environment, I think Gnome is more practical for what I do right now. Aside from Amarok and Ktorrent, virtually all the applications I use on a daily basis are GTK+ based, such as Gnumeric, Abiword, The Gimp, Gnucash, gEdit, Thunar (from Xfce, another nice DE), Firefox, Thunderbird… I could go on.
It is really nice to have a consistent user interface for the first time, where my applications and the desktop work and look the same. Having used GTK+ applications on KDE and Mac OS X for many, many years, it’s certainly a refreshing experience.
Too many GTK+ apps running in GNOME
On the whole I also prefer the simple design methodology behind a lot of what the GNOME people are doing. Despite Linus Torvald’s vocal opposition to it, I believe working hard to make interfaces simpler is an admiral goal.
I’ve still got KDE 3.5.9 on my Athlon XP desktop, but I guess I could say I’m a GNOME user now. For what it’s worth, this is another reason why I love using free and open source software, if I don’t like a particular user interface or environment, or I choose to use a another one, it is completely in my power to just slot in a different one. It’s fantastic!
