So after distro hopping a few times I am back using Karmic and am no longer against it.
GRUB2 finally makes the text on Grub look good, and the fstab errors I was getting were just xsplash being in verbose mode. I fixed all my openbox problems by switching to KDM.
All I need to do now is reduce the GRUB2 boot time now :)
After seeing all the praise that Karmic has gathered, I thought I should share my woes upon finally upgrading today.
First up, Karmic takes longer to boot up than Jaunty, is uglier while booting, and gives me a bunch of nasty /etc/fstab errors when I boot.
Once I got past this annoyance, I discovered that my lovely, beautiful GDM theme had been destroyed with the new incompatible version of GDM and replaced with an ugly theme that requires my to click on my name before typing in my password.
Now, I got even more problems after this because I don’t use Gnome, I switched to Openbox a while back and minced up my Gnome settings to make them work properly with it. So I log in and my panel at the bottom is sitting 30 pixels up from the bottom of the screen and is now floating. Also it seems to have ignored the fact that I have set up 4 workspaces and says I only have one which isn’t even the same name as my first defined desktop.
Conky has now also decided to start flickering on every update and all my file associations have disappeared and now everything is listed as “unknown”.
Rant over [and it's probably not coherent, knowing me]. I’m so ticked off with this update that I’m currently downloading Chakra Linux [arch-based distro] to replace it.
I’ve been playing round with it a bit since my screenshots yesterday, so I thought I’d share.
Conky
I’ll put my .conkyrcs up if anyone should want them :)
So I thought it would be an awesome idea to post screenshots of my Desktop say once a month, so here is the first :P
I’ve been using really really pale themes for the past few weeks (They’re nicer on the eye compared to dark themes) and I’m really loving them. My GTK theme is Leaves and my Openbox theme is a slightly modified Ion theme. Running bmpanel with a slightly modified carbon theme.
Clean.
Dirty.
That I hate the Compiz cube effect.
’nuff said.
In other news, the new linux.com is here. It looks nice, but I’m having doubts as to whether it’s trying to be a social network :/ You can have friends, a blog, groups, applications. This sounds to me very much like Facebook, which is not a bad thing in itself, but does Linux really need its own?
So today, I upgraded my Ubuntu installation to version 9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”. At first glance, it seems to be a very well polished release. The new notifications look nice, it boots faster, and it has a slew of updated packages. You can read a full review here.
But underneath all these additions, there are a few things I’m not impressed with. The first and foremost, is that Tilda has broken. It takes ages to appear upon pressing the hotkey, and if you have the animated drop down enabled it takes even lonker and stutteringly. I searched for a replacement but I couldn’t find anything =[
The new notifications are confusing, too. They don’t dissapear for me when I click on them, I have to hover my mouse over them to make them go away =[ This takes a few more seconds of my time where I could be doing something else!
Compiz has become slightly stuttery from time to time, especially with the “maximise window” effect. The window seems to zoom in for a second, and it freezes there. It didn’t do that before!
A another couple of minor annoyances such as the width of my menus increasing and upon clicking shut down bringing up another button to press before it shuts down (WTF!? I know that when I click shut down I want my computer to shut down!)
Apart from that, it’s a nice release, but I do think Intrepid was nicer!
I’m quite proud of myself for making this script. It may not be particularly complex, but it is my first one that I wrote specifically for a purpose: making a list of my music library as a .php file and uploading it. You can see the output here: http://c6h12o6.co.uk/musiclist.php.
Here is the script itself, complete with fancy # comments =]:
Edit: The code is not displaying properly, so here is a link to the file.
Here’s a conundrum that I came across the other day: what does one call a Linux computer?
We all know that an Apple computer is a Mac; and you must have seen the recent adverts by Micro$oft with their new slogan: “I’m a PC.” So, the question I pose is “Can Linux also use the term PC (Personal Computer) or has the term become too ingrained with Windows to be used for a computer running Linux?”.
Avant window navigator is a Mac OS X like dock for your Linux system. It works as an application launcher/switcher, and also has a wide range of other apps for your convenience. It is also very easy to set up to boot!
Note: you must have a 3D compatible graphics card driver for this to function correctly. Also note that this guide is written with Ubuntu in mind; however the configuration setup should be largely the same for any distro.