Posts Tagged ‘Gnome’

Feisty Beta Laptop Fun

Sunday, April 8th, 2007

I’ve just spent a few hours chilling out with Feisty on my notebook. I’m using a Dell Latitude D600 machine. So far I’m really digging some of the nicer touches in Gnome and I think I’m enjoying the NetworkManager integration (we’ll see, it’s been a problem for me before).

Firstly, as looks go, Feisty isn’t that different from Edgy. Similar bootsplash and Gnome theme. I’ve been a fan of the bootsplash since I first saw it on Edgy, the text is a little thicker now and has a more pronounced light outline. It looks a little softer too, I’m liking it. I have no real opinion on the Human theme, I never use it long enough to notice when it changes. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just like blues better,

I found that both the Universe and Multiverse repos are enabled by default. They should be, since (IMO) you need them to really get the full range of applications and use of your machine. Still, there are some things worth having that aren’t available in the standard repos and you need to go a little further. I found out about Medibuntu whilst doing a little research and added it. You can find out how on this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu. This allowed me to install the w32codecs and a few other non-free/proprietary apps/whatevers.

I checked out the new Restricted Drivers Manager. It was exactly what I expected, useless for me! I don’t have any hardware in this machine that would require any restricted drivers. Hopefully I’ll finally get the Nvidia card I’ve been talking myself into and out of for months and I’ll be able to test the utility out on my desktop.

I was able to test the new Codec manager. This is a gem! It really simplifies getting mp3 and other proprietary codecs on your machine. All you have to do is try to play a file (mp3 for instance). It will just prompt you download/install the codec and you’ll be ready to roll. NICE.

One of the nicer, user friendly features is hidden, I don’t know what the logic behind this is, but I have to assume there is some. If you want to check out the gnome-control-center (without typing that whenever you want to use it), you’ll have to use the menu editor (System > Preferences > Main Menu) and enable it. You’ll find it under the Preferences heading, just check the box next to Control Center. The control center isn’t new, but it certainly looks a lot nicer than the version that shipped with Edgy. Just another enhancement. :)

If you’ve ever used session management in Gnome, check out the updated session manager. You should be pleased. Nuff said.

I can’t say much about the desktop effects on this machine, I’ve always had problems with Compiz and Beryl on it. It just has older hardware and compositing desktop window managers just don’t run well. I look forward to playing with it on my desktop machine later.

All in all, the beta release is working VERY well on my lappy. I’m monitoring a few things for problems and will address them in another post later on this week. I’ve posted “too soon” in the past and I want to be sure things are working properly for me before I say they are.

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Adding “Open Terminal” to Gnome Context Menu

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

Ever wish that you could right-click the Gnome desktop or a folder and open a terminal window? It’s a simple installation away in both Ubuntu and Fedora. I do sorta wonder why this isn’t included in Gnome by default.

Ubuntu:

Open your package manager and locate/install nautilus-open-terminal or alternatively open a terminal prompt and enter the command sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal

Now restart Gnome (log out and back in) or open a terminal and enter ps aux |grep nautilus then locate the PID for nautilus and issue a kill -HUP [pid]

Fedora:

Open a terminal prompt and enter the command su -c ‘yum install nautilus-open-terminal’

Now restart Gnome (log out and back in) or open a terminal and enter ps aux |grep nautilus then locate the PID for nautilus and issue a kill -HUP [pid]

Happy Thanksgiving! Food, football and naps. Who doesn’t love this holiday????

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Fedora Core 6 – SATA & CIFS Problems

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

I’m having two problems with my FC6 install at work (I’m running a Dell OptiPlex GX270, ya know, a basic office machine). One of the issues is more of an annoyance, the other limits my capabilities and I’m bothered that it’s still a problem on this machine.

The lesser of the issues causes slow boot times. While the kernel is loading and before the GUI boot screen, Linux is probing my SATA ports and not finding any drives. That makes sense since there aren’t any SATA drives in this box. I found 2 posts about this issue on Red Hat’s bugzilla, ID 212581 & ID 212737, I see no confirmation of the problem, so who knows when there will be a fix. Its not really a show stopper as the scan times out, gives up, and eventually boots normally.

This issue is the bugger! CIFS mounts with roughly 100 or more files cannot be read. If you’re unfamiliar with CIFS, its the filesystem type used when mounting Samba/Windows shares. As I’m using this machine at work, this one makes me growl. I have up to 15 shares I need to mount from time to time in order to get my work done. Most of them have well over 100 files just in the root of the share. When attempting to navigate offending mounts with Nautilus, I receive an error that reads “The folder contents could not be displayed“. The error I receive when trying to list the contents of the folder via the command line reads “ls: reading directory .: Invalid argument”. This is a real problem for me as I’m responsible for a lot of documentation, I sort them by directory, I have thousands of folders/files (I’m anal about it and document everything) and I can’t access them through file system mounts.

There is a workaround, I can mount using Gnome VFS (Places > Connect to Server), and I can browse using Nautilus (smb://server/share). This isn’t ideal, I would prefer to have a genuine mount. Not all programs are Gnome VFS aware and I don’t see a way to direct Gnome to mount to an actual file system location. That means that if I create a file with an app that can’t utilize Gnome VFS, I need to save the file to my home dir and then copy it off to the VFS mount. If you know of a way to force VFS mounts use a genuine mount point, PLEASE let me know.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212123 says that this problem has been fixed in CVS and an update will be released shortly. That was posted on October 28th and I still haven’t seen an update addressing the issue.

When Looking at this from a Linux newbie point of view (and I do know that Fedora isn’t a newbie focused distro) this is a real problem. There is no fix for the CIFS problem, well, not unless you want to compile your own kernel from CVS (and that’s nothing more than a drug store chain to many people new to Linux) and the potential fix listed for the SATA problem (mentioned in bug 212581) isn’t something a newb would/should be comfortable doing. If I was just giving Linux a shot and started out with Fedora I might be tempted to just say that Linux is broken and go back to Windows.

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Beryl on Fedora Core 6

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

Over the last few days I’ve been exploring the wonders of Beryl. You can read a bit about it on your own over at http://beryl-project.org. If you don’t feel like reading up on it, I can break it down like this; Beryl (which is a fork of Compiz) adds eye-candy and productivity features to your desktop. I’ve found a few handy features that will allow me to work faster and you just can’t beat all of the fancy-schmancy toys.

Sooo, I went to work early this morning (all excited) to install the latest Fedora on my machine. I did the base install for a workstation, installed the apps I use the most and then turned on the nifty desktop effects. It was far less impressive than it was last week (see FC6 First Impressions). After using Beryl on my Ubuntu machine, Compiz is just kinda lame. You get a subset of what is available in Beryl and Fedora didn’t include any way to manage Compiz themes (at least none that I could find).

Is that such a big deal? To me it is.

The Beryl settings manager allows you to tweak features to what feels like an infinite level. You can change default settings (which is good, the wavy menu thing was buggin’ me), disable the effects that annoy or make your system feel slow, and experiment with what makes your desktop experience better. Since I’m running it on an older/less powerful machine here at work I’m tweaking the settings so that things don’t feel so laggy.

Beryl’s Emerald theme manager has (as installed on Fedora) 39 themes available. More than enough to pick your favorite colors to get started with.

Compiz had neither of those nifty config apps and I couldn’t find a suitable substitute in Fedora’s repos. Time to install Beryl.

You’ll have to do a little manual labor to install Beryl on Fedora, the Fedora forum has this post that will make it easy to install. If you’re using FC6, you can skip way down to ” HOWTO : FEDORA CORE 6 – BERYL”, download each RPM to a directory, open a terminal session, change to the directory you downloaded the RPMs to, switch to the root account (su) and enter “rpm -ivh *”. Once all of the packages are installed you can follow the instructions for starting Beryl on the same forum post. Poof! You’re done!

Ahhhh, now the gotcha. Since you’re not installing from your standard package manager, you won’t find Puplet or Yum telling you that there are updated packages when new versions of Beryl are released. I’m hoping the author of the post will keep the RPMs updated but you can’t count on that. If it comes down to it, you could compile new releases yourself. If you’re anything like me, that thought could make you a little nervous (esp if you’ve failed to compile things on Fedora as many times as I have). I personally believe that the benefits outweigh the risk. I find Beryl to be a bit more stable than Fedora’s Compiz (which surprised me). Using Compiz I found my Gnome terminals crashing frequently and that hasn’t happened yet with Beryl.

Going back to my tweaking now.. I’ve found that disabling Trail Focus and shortening the animation durations have really improved the feel of things on this GX270 :)

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Ubuntu Edgy Eft, First Impressions

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Hey hey,

As it turns out, the problems I had installing the latest Ubuntu were caused by my DVD/CD burner. I couldn’t get a “good burn” until I used a different machine with a different burner. Funny enough, I don’t have problems when burning DVDs, it only seems to be an issue when burning CDRs. Once I overcame that particular hurdle I was able to install Edgy an give it a shot.

Moving on, Ubuntu 6.10, the Edgy Eft!

Boot times have REALLY improved. Changing from INIT to Upstart seems to have made a real difference. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what the differences are, I can only tell you that I’ve stripped out all of the services I don’t need on my dapper install and the Edgy boot time (unmodified) smokes Dapper.

They’ve FINALLY come up with a really nice looking boot splash. Nice work! It looks professional and sleek. The Human theme has gone through some changes, its a bit lighter and easier on the eyes. I still had to change it to something blue and more my style. I do like the Human theme, I just always find myself going to something blue or black/gray.

Installing Compiz is a simple process, technically I didn’t install compiz, I installed the Beryl fork using the guide available on the Ubuntu forums. Beryl is far cooler than the stock compiz in Fedora. I’m so new to these enhanced desktop effects that I can’t really go into the details of it. Once I get some experience with them I’ll give my impressions.

Edgy includes the latest and greatest Gnome, Firefox, Gaim, OpenOffice and other apps. If you want the newest, you’ll find it all here. I’m a huge fan of having the latest of everything, of course that can cause some instability. I haven’t been using Edgy long enough to say if there are any problems. If I find any, I’ll post about them here.

If its possible for you, I would suggest installing Edgy fresh. I haven’t attempted a Dapper upgrade, but I have seen a lot of people seeking help regarding issues with INIT/Upstart in the Ubuntu IRC channels. It makes sense to me, Edgy is such a different beast.. Upgrading could be a dangerous undertaking.

All in all, I’m really liking Edgy. IMO, for a new user it’s still above Fedora. I’ll still be using Fedora at work (I’m looking forward to getting in early Monday morning to get it installed) but at home I’m all Ubuntu :)

Next project, getting the laptop up to Edgy and exploring the improved Gnome power management.

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Fedora Core 6, First Impressions

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Hey hey!

The very first thing I did this morning was to burn the DVD copy of FC6 that I downloaded overnight and install it to a spare partition on my machine here at home. The install doesn’t take very long, I chose to do a default desktop install and let it go…

Visually, Fedora is the best looking distro I’ve used. They’ve updated the graphics and theme (as they do with every release). The logo is just sexy, it’s darker than Core 5 and IMO looks a LOT better. I couldn’t stand the light blue bubbly look of 5. The boot splash, login theme and default desktop all flow and have a common look. I’ll be keeping the desktop background for a while, it has an under water feel to it and I’m digging on it. :)

Boot times are similar to FC5, to me it’s just fast. I’ve heard people call Fedora bloated, I’m just not understanding why. It doesn’t load a lot of services that I don’t need and feels fast to me.

The software selection is minimal in a default install, and I like that. You end up with a Gnome desktop, OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Evolution, Rythymbox and a few other apps. All in all, a decent place to start.

Firefox is at version 1.5.0.7 and Gnome is at 2.16. I’m not surprised that FF isn’t up to version 2 yet, FF2 just went gold this week. I’m a little surprised that Gnome isn’t up to 2.18 though. I didn’t follow the development of this release so I’m not sure what the reasoning was. I’ll just take a guess and say that by the time 2.18 was released they had already put too much effort into development to just up and change to the latest version. Gaim and OpenOffice are the latest releases, Gaim is the latest v2 beta and OO.o is v2.04.

*** Edit ***

I was wrong, Gnome 2.16 is the latest stable release. My mistake.

** End Edit ***

Out of the box there are some 10 updates that need to be applied. Pup lets you know and performs the update with about 3 mouse clicks and one password prompt. It’s a nice simple way to keep your machine up to date. Who doesn’t like that??

My first impressions are good. My only complaint about Fedora comes from the fact that I’m a newb and I’ve been using Ubuntu. The package selection isn’t weak, but it doesn’t even compete with Ubuntu’s.

So now I’m off to play, I need to install some of my applications. Add some repos and get to playing. This is actually the first time I’ve had to configure a Fedora release without the assistance of fedorafaq.org. Should be interesting :P

** Edit **

I’ve spent a couple of hours playing with FC6 now. I’ve got AIGLX/Compiz running (oh and doing that was just a few mouse clicks, System > Preferences > Desktop Effects) on my Intel card, using the i810 driver. I’ve got most of the software I like to use (mplayer, amarok etc) running, and running well. The only issue I’ve had is there are times when I open an instance of gnome-terminal, all of my existing terminal windows close (ack, now that is annoying). This only happens when I have the desktop effects enabled. I’ll look into that when I have time.

If you want to check out Linux eye candy and have a helluva good distro running, take some time to install FC6 and give it a shot!

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More Man Page Goodness

Saturday, October 7th, 2006

In my last post I covered reading man pages via the console. Depending on your distro, you may find that man pages are available via your desktop’s GUI help center.

Ubuntu does this very well, while Fedora had some wonkiness.

Ubuntu/Gnome users can select System > Help > System Documentation. The Help Topics page contains a few categories dedicated to Ubuntu specific documentation, scrolling down will show Other Document Categories. Here you will want to click the Command Line Help link. You will be shown two more categories; GNU Info Pages and Manual Pages. Info pages tend to be more in depth where man pages give you the basics and then leave you to experiment. Once you select one of these categories, you’ll find yet another collection of categories, you can select one of them or simply enter the command you’re interested in learning about into the search field. Entering shutdown will give you the man page for the shutdown command.

Note: When I first entered the help center and attempted to search for some common commands, the results didn’t include any man pages. Once I browsed through some of the available man pages, the search results began including manuals. YMMV.

Fedora works much the same way, within Gnome you select System > Help. You’ll have fewer categories, but the command line help is there. I’ve found that browsing the command line help works perfectly, however I usually prefer to just search for what I want. Here is where Fedora has some issues. Entering shutdown into the search field results in the help center displaying a link to the man page, clicking on that link gives nothing more than an error about an invalid uniform resource identifier. My Google-fu might be lacking today, I just can’t locate any fixes for it.

If you’d rather not read your man pages via the terminal, this is the graphical way to get it done.

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