{"id":747,"date":"2006-02-27T15:51:48","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T22:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp\/?p=747"},"modified":"2006-02-27T15:51:48","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T22:51:48","slug":"linux-desktop-miscellany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2006\/02\/27\/linux-desktop-miscellany\/","title":{"rendered":"Linux Desktop Miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sog\/105462856\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/41\/105462856_181a02f962_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n <\/p>\n<p>  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sog\/105462856\/\">Latest Screenshot<\/a><br \/>\n  <br \/>\n  Originally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/sog\/\">sogrady<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>A couple of folks have pinged me regarding the apparent disconnect between the Novell\/<a href=\"http:\/\/www.novell.com\/linux\/xglrelease\/\">Xgl<\/a> crowd and the Red Hat\/<a href=\"http:\/\/fedoraproject.org\/wiki\/RenderingProject\/aiglx\">AIGLX<\/a>, possibly because it&#8217;s an area that has impactions on the direction of Linux on the desktop, open source community development, and more. Well, I&#8217;ll get to that eventually but have to deal with some travel and so forth before then; in the meantime watch the del.icio.us links for the next couple of days as I have a bunch of related (lingering) tabs awaiting tagging. <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not all the desktop news I had, however, as I did want to comment quickly on a couple of changes I&#8217;ve made to my desktop recently. If you&#8217;re not a Linux desktop guy, you might want to skip the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>NetworkManager<\/b>: <br \/>\nThe hoops I had to <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.gentoo.org\/viewtopic-t-350333-start-25.html\">jump through<\/a> to get this working over the weekend is the best argument I&#8217;ve heard yet for Ubuntu, but now that I&#8217;ve got it working (it&#8217;s the wifi selector in the upper right hand corner) it&#8217;s excellent. Unlike a friend of mine here in Denver running XP, it selects and grabs the network first time &#8211; no fuss, no muss. I seriously spent 30 minutes a while ago having her reselect her network, only to have it take on the 15th or 20th time. <\/p>\n<li><b>Aesthetics<\/b>: <br \/>\nAfter not having touched them in a while, I got antsy and changed my default themes\/fonts around for the desktop and it looks quick a bit spiffier to me. For those curious (read: the geekier folks out there), I&#8217;m now running Bitstream Vera Sans Roman as my default application fonts, and am using the following combination for my theme: Tango &#8211; Icons, Clearlooks-Visto &#8211; Controls, and Clearlooks for Window Border. It&#8217;s still not in the same league as OS X visually &#8211; at least until I get really crazy and get either AIGLX or Xgl running (Xgl&#8217;s likely out for the time being b\/c I&#8217;m on the i810 chipset), but I&#8217;m finding it very comfortable and not terribly ugly. If any of you have other suggestions for fonts or themes, I&#8217;m always willing to listen, as my design sense is way south of poor. Don&#8217;t forget, incidentally, that you can get my Maine sunset themed NLD derived GDM theme <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/sogrady\/archives\/000815.html\">here<\/a>. <\/p>\n<li><b>Beagle<\/b>: <br \/>\nAs mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/sogrady\/archives\/001237.html\">previously<\/a>, I&#8217;ve had an ongoing issue with the Beagle desktop search tool. After looking around this weekend, it seems as if the cause is simple: Beagle is running in debug mode by default. Unfortunately, I&#8217;m unable to get it to run normally, so for the moment that&#8217;s been removed from the startup programs lineup. Tough to take it out of the lineup, even briefly; the Lucene based indexer is both fast and good. <\/p>\n<li><b>Tomboy<\/b>: <br \/>\nI haven&#8217;t actually changed this yet, but I&#8217;ve been toying with the idea of running a transform on the base XML files that makeup my Tomboy notes, then cutting over to a local wiki instance. Might be a self-contained TiddlyWiki derivative (it&#8217;s a BSD license), such as the one <a href=\"http:\/\/geekfreak.wordpress.com\/\">Davey<\/a> was showing me at Mashup Camp (very slick), but I&#8217;m keeping an open mind. As Alex and I discussed last week, running a local webserver instance just isn&#8217;t that big a deal any longer &#8211; particularly since Tomboy seems to be working harder and harder these days (Rail&#8217;s WEBrick is quite illustrative in this regard). You have to love having your notes in accessible format.<\/ul>\n<p>Questions, suggestions or corrections on any of the above? You know where to find me.<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Latest Screenshot Originally uploaded by sogrady. A couple of folks have pinged me regarding the apparent disconnect between the Novell\/Xgl crowd and the Red Hat\/AIGLX, possibly because it&#8217;s an area that has impactions on the direction of Linux on the desktop, open source community development, and more. Well, I&#8217;ll get to that eventually but have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}