After doing some more experimenting with the unstable release of Debian, I so royally messed up my ThinkPad I decided to wipe it clean and start again! For a change and given 12 is coming in 6 days, I thought I’d try out Fedora. So far I’m impressed. Now if only it could take screenshots and go on standby…!
Given my MacBook Pro’s sudden loss of a screen I’ve had to rely on my ThinkPad X40 with Debian to be my mobile workhorse not just a netbook while I get it fixed. As such I’ve decided to start a small series of posts on how to make the Gnome desktop more Mac like. Riveting stuff!
If you’re used to Mac OS X, the title bar buttons all seem to be in the wrong places in Unix like desktop environments. In KDE and Xfce it’s easy to modify their positioning, but in Gnome you have to use the Configuration Editor.
Fire up the Configuration Editor from the Applications > System Tools menu, then expand out the apps folder, then the metacity, then click general. The eighth item down is titled button_label and by default has the following:
menu:minimize,maximize,close
You can emulate the layout of Mac OS X by changing it to:
close,minimize,maximize:menu
Note the American spelling, a few times I wrote that line and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, turns out I was spelling the words with s not z!
These steps are current as of Gnome 2.26.1.
I won’t be giving up Xfce on my FreeBSD desktop any time soon, but Gnome on my ThinkPad X40 keeps finding new ways to surprise me. Its a beautiful thing, and its free!
This might be an old feature, but its one I’ve found wildly useful: the ability to set locations in the panel clock. Other desktops let you do this, but it’s all the little extras that Gnome does. Perhaps KDE 4.2 does, I haven’t had the chance to try yet.
When you define a series of locations they appear on a map of the world complete with an approximate night/day cast. Under the map each location is shown with digital and analogue clocks, and what I’ve found absolutely brilliant is each timezone is displayed relative to where you are, NOT to GMT! For example I can see Singapore is 1:30 behind us here in Adelaide, and Jim Kloss is 17:30 behind.
By default it’s turned off, but if you use Gnome click the clock on your panel and click Locations.
I know I’ve posted about it far too much, but I just have to post one more time about my experiences with this amazing little machine.
It’s been over a week since I installed Debian Lenny on my newly bought second hand ThinkPad X40 and it’s exceeded all my expectations. I honestly have not been as impressed with a non-Mac piece of hardware for years. It’s extremely lightweight, has a fantastic full keyboard and despite having an old battery I still get 3+ hours with the screen set to full brightness and WiFi on. I’ve literally walked into lectures and tutorials at uni with just this machine which has been such a tremendous relief on my back compared to lugging my 15″ MacBook Pro. It’s light, solidly built and it’s 1.4GHz Pentium M with a scant 512MiB of memory perform far above what I expected.
As an Xfce user on FreeBSD the other thing I’ve been surprised by is how much I’m enjoying Gnome 2.26. The problem is I tend to use FreeBSD on older machines and servers so Gnome has always been overkill but it works beautifully even on this older hardware. The built in graphical tools allow me to update software, configure wireless networks and even have true composting video effects which means I can have translucent menubars and all that cool stuff. The system also boots up quickly and standby works. It’s almost feels as if IBM shipped me this ThinkPad with the software preinstalled.
I am still primarily a Mac guy, but I must admit I’m tempted at some point when I decide to replace my MacBook Pro to spend the same amount of money on a brand new ThinkPad and put Debian or FreeBSD on it. If Debian with one of the heaviest *nix desktop environments performs this amazingly well on a four year old machine, imagine how well it would run on a current one! It’d be stunning!
Having used Macs I cringe at the very sight of so many nasty, horribly flimsy, cheap and plastic PC laptops being passed off as well designed and expensive (not to even start on the budget craptops) but my dad always said his ThinkPads were fantastic machines and now that I have a tiny one of my own I can honestly say I see the appeal.
Yes I only just posted this picture in a previous post talking about Debian, but I just have to come out and say purple and violet are some of the greatest colours in the world. That’s okay to admit, isn’t it?
I haven’t had much time to theme this Gnome desktop yet, and heaven knows I’m not a Nurie, but I think the Crux icons and Unity GTK+ theme with 65% transparency in menu bars and Terminal windows for a purplish Mac OS X look is pretty swish.
Even with full composting on a heavy desktop environment like Gnome the system is still able to fly on my ThinkPad X40 which was built four years ago. That’s something Windows 7 can barely pull off on similar hardware let alone Vista.
The background image is of course the awesome Senjougahara Hitagi from Bakemonogatari which I’ve been reviewing here. Interestingly enough if you do an image search for Senjougahara Hitagi on The Googles one of my posts is currently the third result on the first page. Apparently her fan club is small!
For a bit of a change in Xfce on my FreeBSD machines I’ve decided to eschew the Tango Project iconset and use the Gnome Desktop icons available from the ports collection:
# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/gnome-icons
# make install clean
# echo "Grilled Cheese Sandwiches"
They’re very classy and quite minimalistic which really appeals to me, and even though I use Xfce instead of Gnome which the icons were originally designed for, they work smashingly. Did I just say "smashingly?"
Now if only the folder icons weren’t that dull sand colour we’d be in business!
So that I can reference what I use in future posts, I’ve already written a list of security and privacy extensions I use with Mozilla Firefox and commented that they’re the primary reasons I choose to use it over every other browser. Using a browser without those extensions (or equivalents) makes me feel naked and scared now! You can take that however you want.
I’ve installed far too many extensions over the years that I’ve later never used, but these are the usability ones that have stuck.
Absolutely essential, it reduces irritating distractions on pages and makes them render much faster because you’re downloading less stuff. Some people complain about Adblock Plus. I ask how many of them own a DVR which skips ads, or how many of them have a WC break or a snack instead of watching sponsors of a sports event. Enough said.
Greasemonkey ets you modify the appearance and function of individual sites and pages by clicking and automagically installing scripts from sites such as UserScripts and UserStyles. Once you have scripts installed, they work transparently and so fast you can’t tell they’re even there.
I started using this when I thought Google messed up Reader’s interface.
I mostly use the shell to quickly get sftp work done, but for tedious and repetitive tasks FireFTP makes it really simple. If you’re one of the few who haven’t tried it, it launches itself as a tab within Firefox and uses the split file manager metaphor like Norton Commander with the left pane showing your local drive and the right showing the remote server.
FireFTP is honestly polished enough to be a standalone application.
I find it curious that even if you explicitly download the "English (GB)" versions of Firefox, it still comes with the American spelling dictionary which battling with gets pretty old fast.
This extension is fairly old as far as extensions go, but it still works even in the lastest Firefox 3 builds. And besides, you could argue spelling doesn’t change as fast as builds of an open source project do. Wait, ignore what I just typed; that’s a Pandora’s box I would rather leave shut!
If you don’t like being scolded for not peppering your words with Zed, grab it!
Adds a world clock to either your status bar or your bookmarks bar; I choose the latter.Insanely useful to have right in your browser where you’re most likely to be viewing things and conversing with people from other parts of the world.
For example, I can check just by looking at it what the time is in Singapore when I’m in Adelaide and vica versa, as well as the eastern Aussie states, the UK, Talkeetna, Toronto, Tokyo… I thought that was some clever alliteration.
The Life-of-request info extension adds a really useful monitor to your status bar that shows how many seconds, how much data and how many requests a page took to render. Supposed to be used for people who want to monitor the performance of their own websites, but I use it for everything!
For example, did you know a Whole Wheat Radio page heavy with images and other media renders faster than many commercial websites? Wonder if it’s faster than the RIAA or ARIA…
I discussed these late last year. In a nutshell, these themes make Firefox look much more Mac like. Firefox 3 was a huge improvement over version 2, but it still looks a bit kludgy.
I use this theme for Firefox on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes. It replaces the default toolbar icons and styles with ones that match your other GTK+ applications. Fits really well with Xfce and window managers such as dwm or OpenBox where you’re using mostly GTK+ apps like RoxFiler and Gnumeric.
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!
It’s been a few days since I started using Gnome on my primary desktop, and I think I’m starting to get used to it. More on that will be in another post.
One problem I encountered after compiling gnome2 from ports on FreeBSD is that File Roller (labeled Archive Manager on the Gnome menu) has difficulty with zip and rar files. If you open one, it spits out an error message similar to this:
Could not open SpywareWriterForWindowsHehe.zip
Archive type not supported
The problem stems from File Roller not being able to find the right command line utilities. Others may work, but I’ve found success by installing the aptly-named unzip and unrar from ports:
# portsnap fetch update
# cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip && make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/archivers/unrar && make install clean
% echo "Burchfield Nines was one of his best albums"
You can install the packages if you prefer, though honestly even my Pentium MMX machine was able to make light work of them.
# pkg_add -rv unzip
# pkg_add -rv unrar
For what it’s worth, you can just as easily use these command line tools on the… command line, to extract files from zip and rar archives:
% unzip -jv archive.zip
% unrar -ev archive.rar
If you remember back a few weeks ago I posted that I had inherited a Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook. It’s no MacBook Air in the design department, but without optical and floppy disk drives, it’s very lightweight and small. It’s also several years old and has very conservative specs (600MHz Mobile PIII from 2002!) though, so it certainly won’t be running Windows Vista any time soon… which is just fine because my favourite OS (for non-Apple hardware of course!) is FreeBSD.
Before I go any further I have to say this right up front: FreeBSD in the mobile space has come a long way. Despite my preference for the BSDs I always told people up until recently that they were better off running a flavour of Linux such as Slackware or Gentoo (my two preferred distributions) if they wanted to run a free OS that was a bit more technical and capable on their laptops.
Not any more! I popped in a home burned CD of the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0-RELEASE) and booted the installer and was absolutely blown away by the hardware support. Not only did it detect the internal 10/100 ethernet port and the ATI graphics but the PCMCIA wireless card which has always been iffy in past experiences. After installing, booting for the first time, updating the base system, installing Gnome2-lite from ports and configuring Xorg I had a slick and completely usable desktop (rearranged to resemble Leopard of course!):
What also really blows me away is how responsive all the applications are, especially on a fully fledged DE like Gnome (which itself only takes a few seconds to start) and on such conservative hardware: granted I almost tripled the amount of built in memory from 128MiB to 320MiB and installed a new hard drive with a much larger cache than the previous stock!
I can really see myself using this instead of my MacBook Pro in settings such as coffee shops or for lectures where I’m only running a local wiki for note taking, editing source code and using email; the marketing for the Asus EeePC and the MacBook Air is starting to sink in it seems! I could have used Xfce, Fluxbox or the like, but I’m so impressed with Gnome’s performance as is, currently I don’t see the need.
I’m still in the early stages of setting this machine up with its new OS and DE, but I’ll post more information as I find out. On my current to do list: figure out if and how the "soft buttons" above the regular keyboard can be used somehow, getting high resolution console support compiled into the kernel and figuring out how to adjust the screen brightness on the fly. I haven’t tested the built-in modem yet as I haven’t needed it, but potentially getting that set up to send faxes would be useful too.
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
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