Posts tagged ubuntu

I’m looking forward to seeing the launch of Ubuntu 10.04, and plan to spend some time installing the latest and greatest on my lil’ Netbook tomorrow (assuming I can get to the download servers, of course!).

The question is: Netbook Remix, or not Netbook Remix. I’ve used 9.10 NR quite a lot, and like its interface and maximal use of screen estate, but wonder what new goodness the 10.04 version brings to the table. Googling reveals either too little information, or too much.

Anyone know what’s new & improved in 10.04 Netbook Edition over 9.10 and 10.04 Desktop? Enquiring minds want to know.

Like

Unlike

Yesterday I committed heresy.

I removed Linux from my laptop.

Before you burn me at the stake, let me explain though. I’ve run Linux since the penguin was an egg. It’s been on every single computer I’ve owned, frequently as the sole Operating System. This laptop has run Ubuntu Linux through 5.10 to 6.06 to 7.06 to 7.10 all the way to the latest betas of 8.04, all upgrading seamlessly along the way. That’s quite an achievement, especially compared to the Wonderful World of Windows where you have to wipe-and-reinstall if you so much as sneeze in the wrong direction.

But now, it’s time for a de-clutter. Space is short on this little laptop, so I decided to completely remove my Ubuntu partition, resize my XP partition to fill the drive and sit back and wait.

I’ve ordered a shiny new Ubuntu 8.04 CD, and when that arrives I’m going to start afresh. In the meantime, my Linux needs are being sated by a teeny tiny 50Mb install of Damn Small Linux running under qemu inside XP. That’ll do for now.

I feel so dirty stuck in Windows XP all the time. Ick. It’s amazing how the change of OS makes such a difference – performance is MUCH lower under Windows, and stability is, frankly, a bit of a joke when you’re used to not rebooting for months on end. Needs must though – Poser demands LOTS of disk space.

Give it a week. I’ll be running back to Linux with my head in my hands, I’m sure

Like

Unlike

In which greywulf digs deeply into Linux config files and whatnot. Tread carefully, dear reader.

Over the years I’ve formulated my own personal theory about what the perfect desktop interface should look like. Perfect for me, of course. Your needs are quite likely to be very different, so bear with me on this one.

Here’s the theory, in short: Windows is upside down.

Perhaps I should explain.

The perfect desktop interface do the following things:

• Have the taskbar at the top of the screen. Our eyes naturally travel down the display, so our work and content (y’know, the important stuff) should go right to the bottom of the screen. The interface itself should be in the least obtrusive and noticeable place on the display; the top. That means you have to consciously glance up to break from your work pattern rather than it keep catching your eye. At the same time, it should always be visible so that no additional keystroke or mouse gesture are needed just to check the time, see if an application is running or whatever.
• The taskbar should be as small as possible while still be comfortable to check with a glance. Mine, for example, is just 19 pixels thick. That’s about half the size of the standard Windows XP taskbar.
• The desktop interface should take up as little memory as possible, be 100% rock solid stable and be an unobtrusive as possible; these go without saying, though seem to fly in the face of modern OS design.
• The windows themselves should have a small titlebar, but this disappears when the window is maximized; in essence, the taskbar becomes the titlebar for maximized windows. All of the usual functions of the titlebar (name, restore size, close) as replicated by the windows’ entry in the taskbar anyhow, so why duplicate and waste valuable screenspace for a maximized application?
• Multiple workspaces are available via a mouse-click or simple key combination. For example, I use four workspaces arranged in a two-by-two grid, and use Control+Up/Down/Left and Right to switch between them. This makes it simple to move applications out of the way if they’re fire-and-forget apps, or if you’re working on multiple projects at the same time. I tend to have one workspace with Opera, a Terminal and a File Manager open, and another for coding or graphics work with a couple free for other stuff.
• Every mouse action should have a key combination. I can maximize my windows with a mouse click, or press Alt-F11 to toggle between maximized and regular fit.

It’s been my long-term goal to find a way of getting all that functionality in one package for Ubuntu Linux, and I think that (at last!) I’ve found it. The default GNOME interface comes close but takes far too many system resources. While I like the standard Ubuntu look, the two-panel design does nothing for me at all, and it’s the first thing to go. GNOME doesn’t want to lose the titlebar for windows at all without some arcane devilspie voodoo, and that’s just too much of a kludge for my liking. KDE is too much gloss and not enough productivity, and other, lighter window managers such as fluxbox, fvwm and xfce just don’t do it for me, so………..

Enter Openbox.

It’s time for some pretty pictures, don’t you think? Click for larger image, as ever.

Here’s my new, shiny desktop layout, complete with pretty wallpaper courtesy of http://www.gnome-look.org. The gnome-panel taskbar is at the top of the screen just as nature intended with a single menu icon alongside quick launch buttons for the gnome-terminal and Opera. At the other end of the task bar is a clock, workspace switcher, and notification area. The rest of the bar is reserved for the tasklist.

It’s worth noting that this is still GNOME, but using openbox rather than the far more weighty metacity as the underlying window manager. We’ll come onto that in a while.

Here’s a terminal open and ready to play, complete with obligatory tinted transparent effect. My little laptop’s integrates graphics card (Unichrome. Ugh!) won’t handle the advanced whizzbang of compiz and suchlike, so this is plain, functional and fast default X-Windows goodness.

The font I’m using in the terminal, btw, is call Domestic Manners. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Just to show what I mean by “no titlebar when maximized”, here’s the terminal doing just that. No functionality is lost by ditching the titlebar, but you can a good 20 pixels or real estate. That’s like a screen upgrade, for free

To restore the application back to it’s default size (I tend to work maximized all the time anyhow), either right-click the taskbar entry and select “Unmaximize” or press Alt-F11. Either is good.

Now, onto how to set all this up on a Linux box of your very own. These instructions are for Ubuntu, but they should adapt to pretty much any Linux distro out there. Just replace the download instructions with the suitable equivalents for rpm, yum, or whatever.

Assuming you’ve got a working GNOME setup, type

 sudo apt-get install openbox openbox-themes obconf

into a terminal window, then enter

 openbox --replace

This ditches the memory hungry metacity and replaces it with the lighter, smarter openbox. On my system, replacing metacity with openbox saves 30 to 50Mb of memory. Wow!

Type obconf and select a suitable theme. I use the real-milk theme, for example.

Next, setup a top gnome-panel as detailed above and remove the bottom panel, if any.

Openbox stores its setup in a single .xml file called ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml. Here’s mine for reference. Either use it as-is or copy-and-paste as required. The important sections I’ve changed are how openbox handles window maximization and the keyboard shortcuts.

Find the section labeled

     <context name="Maximize">

Replace the Left Click option as follows:

      <mousebind button="Left" action="Click">
        <action name="ToggleMaximizeFull"/>
	<action name="ToggleDecorations"/>
      </mousebind>

Add another keybind to do the same with a press of Alt-F11 (or whatever you prefer):

	<keybind key="A-F11">
	  <action name="ToggleMaximizeFull"/>
	  <action name="ToggleDecorations"/>
	</keybind>

While we’re at it, I also add in keyboard shortcuts to bring up the Application menu with a press of the Windows key, and give me a Run application dialog on Alt-F2:

	<keybind key="Super_L">
	    <action name="execute"><execute>gnome-panel-control --main-menu</execute></action>
	</keybind>
	<keybind key="A-F2">
	    <action name="execute"><execute>gnome-panel-control --run-dialog</execute></action>
	</keybind>

Finally, change the keyboard shortcuts to switch workspaces from the finger-yoga inducing Control-Shift-Up/Down, etc to just Control-Up/Down, etc:

    <keybind key="C-Left">
      <action name="DesktopLeft">
        <dialog>no</dialog>
        <wrap>no</wrap>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="C-Right">
      <action name="DesktopRight">
        <dialog>no</dialog>
        <wrap>no</wrap>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="C-Up">
      <action name="DesktopUp">
        <dialog>no</dialog>
        <wrap>no</wrap>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <keybind key="C-Down">
      <action name="DesktopDown">
        <dialog>no</dialog>
        <wrap>no</wrap>
      </action>
    </keybind>

Phew. It’s all in the rc.xml I’ve uploaded anyhow.

Finally (really finally, this time), close all the windows on your Desktop and go to System->Preferences->Sessions in the taskbar menu. Select the Session Options and click “Remember current running applications”. That’s locked GNOME into using openbox from hereon.

There you have it.

My desktop nirvana.

Linux

Like

Unlike

One thing I want to do in 2008 is delve even deeper into the inner workings of Linux, and Ubuntu in particular.

To that end, I’ve finally become an official Ubuntu member. Yep, I’m an Ubuntero and my profile is here. That’s the social networking side of Ubuntu where folks can meet, greet and generally geek out in the comfort of their own homes. Also, I’ve signed up with Launchpad to help contribute toward advocacy, bug testing and application developement. Here’s my profile over there. I’m going to try to keep the two sides in sync where possible, so when I start contributing to projects I’ll make a note in Ubuntero. That’s the theory, anyhow.

Meanwhile, I need more coffee.

Like

Unlike

No, not that kind of BLT, but this blt. Lower case, see?

blt is hereby my Ubuntu App of the Day, and has been for the past few days too. It’s a command-line updater for Twitter (here’s me) which makes it dead, dead easy to keep sending updates to Twitter if, like me, you spend 90% of your time in a text terminal.

Rather than follow the instructions at blt’s homepage, I just downloaded it, set my username/password and started posting. Didn’t change a thing in my .bashrc, no siree.

For those that don’t know, Twitter is something of a microblog which accepts posts of 160 characters or less; it’s designed to be as simple as possible (with a wonderfully open API) so folks can do funky stuff from a minimalist base. It’s great for posting up todo lists, notes to yourself, info about what you’re doing when; think of it as global SMS for the internet, and you’re there. It integrates well with Facebook as well, so it’s easy to use blt, via Twitter, to keep your Facebook status up-to-date too.

blt is just one more way to simplify the process; from any command prompt I can post a quick note and it’s there, for all to see without the tedious need to open a webpage, login, click on the “New Post” link and do all the other stuff that “traditional” blogging required. I type blt Blogging about blt and it’s there, for all to see. (See!)

Simple = clever. Everytime.

Linux

Like

Unlike