Martin Notes

I’ve been searching for a new approach to filemanagement for a while now. In my search I ran into Nemo. That’s a pretty interesting idea. It organizes your files grouped by date. I don’t know if that works, you loose the possibility to make your own structure. I like to keep a project oriented structure in my files, I’m not sure the date thing would work.

But at least somebody is thinking of other solutions then the directory thing which sucks for years already. My project directory contains about 8500 files, and that’s the from the last two years only. How am I going to find anything in that? The Google approach is the best so far: just search. Sadly there are very little desktop client that really enable this. Google Desktop is too clumsy and takes too much CPU. Deskbar is rubbish, at least I can never find what I’m looking for. Tracker… Nice try.

Are there any alternatives? Tagging sounds promising. If I can tag my documents, preferably in a visual way (drag some existing tags to it, or something). Then some tag cloud to browse… Maybe it would work.

Then I was playing with Cairo Dock. It took me hours to get it to do what I want. The good thing is: it can do what I want, the bad thing is: it takes a lot of time. The config gui is absolute crap. Anyway, it does work, that’s cool!

GUI, Linux Cairo Dock, Nemo

The new Elementary theme is pretty good. I don’t like the GDM theme and the scroll bars have reversed light and dark, but the overall look is quite good.

Apparently it’s really complicated to create a dark theme that still works. There are a lot of themes available but they all have a weak spot. This one is working so far…

I’m using AWN right now, but I’m switching to Cairo Dock. Man, what a huge amount of configs!

GUI, Linux Elementary, theme

Who would have guessed that you could do this with a stylesheet:

a[href $='.pdf'] {
 padding-right: 18px;
 background: transparent url(icon_pdf.gif) no-repeat center right;
}

Read more

GUI, Web css stylesheets, web development

Did you even notice that applications you start as root (for example: synaptic) look pretty crappy? I noticed it often, but I never came to the obvious conclusion: the themes and icons are not available when you’re root since you installed them in your home folder.

Just executing:

sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root
sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root

Fixes the problem. It is not a beautiful solution, but it works perfectly!

GUI, Linux root themes

Why are we still working with menus in our desktops? It’s just about the most stupid way to give access to features in an application. Menus don’t give the user the possibility to ‘ask’ an application if a feature is available. If a feature is hidden somewhere deep the user might even never find it.

I’m pretty sure interaction designers thought a lot on how to replace menus. But I still see the concept coming back in every application an every website.

Looking forward to the web 3.0 ideas: why don’t we at least have a way to search in the features that an application provides? Why can’t I search in a menu? Better then that: why can’t I search for a feature? I’d like to enter in a word processor: “paper size” and then I want to see the dialog where I can set the paper size. I don’t want to enter the help, search, and get an explanation where I can do what I just found! That’s how we had to solve it in the 80’s, but applications should be able to do a bit more now.

Enterprise 2.0, GUI desktop, menus

Ok, so I spend another day configuring my Ubuntu… My girlfriend was out all day and we had rain in Amsterdam, what else is there to do then reconfigure everything you’ve configured a thousand times before?

So I set of to figure out if I could get my desktop to work without Compiz. I wanted this because Compiz wants your virtual desktop to be smaller then 2048 pixels, which sucks. The thing keeping me from just turning Compiz off was, please don’t kick me, Google Gadgets. I really love that little app, but it looks like total crap without a compositing window manager.

Then I remembered that Gnome 2.22 (the default in Ubuntu 8.04) has ’some’ compositing features. Some searching gave me this:http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.22/#sect:metacity. That works just fine, Google apps does still have a transparent background.

Cool! So now I can disable Compiz (Appearance -> Visual Effects –> none). With my setup that also killed the <Alt>Tab – windows switch. That is solvable in the Keyboard Shortcuts under the remarkable name of: “Move between windows with popup”. It took me 30 minutes to find that…

With that done, I wanted to have the fn-f7 of my Sony to work as it was meant to. It should switch through the different monitor settings possible: internal, external, both, mirrored… I found a script that does this perfectly: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Sample_Fn-F7_script

Having that script it was easy to add a acpi key event that calls the script. I created two scripts:

• sonyvideoswitch (download)

Download sonyvideoswitch.sh and move it to /etc/acpi

• sony-videoswitch:

# /etc/acpi/events/sony-brightness-up
event=sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000012
action=/etc/acpi/sonyvideoswitch.sh toggle

Create sony-videoswitch in /etc/acpi/events/.

NOTE: don’t forget to add the Virtual to your SubSection “Display” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. This should contain the maximum virtual desktop.

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu Compiz, Multiple monitors

Google finally launched their sidebar with gadgets for Linux. That’s good. What’s bad, you have to build it yourself. The build process is well described, but it took me a while before I discovered that they have a separate description for Ubuntu (among others).

• You can download Google Gadgets from: http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/
• The dependencies for Ubuntu are here: http://groups.google.com/group/google-gadgets-for-linux-user/web/building-instructions-addendum
• Build instructions: http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/wiki/HowToBuild

I’ve added Google Gadget to my widget layer in Compiz so that it doesn’t take any screenspace. Just go to the widget plugin in Compiz and add: name=ggl-gtk

[UPDATE]

There is already a Ubuntu repo: http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/06/introducing-official-google-gadgets-for.html

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu

I might just have found my GTK theme: Murrine. The Carmello theme is beautifull!

GUI, Ubuntu Carmello, Murrine

I’ve been looking for an alternative to the gnome menu for a while now. I think I’ve found it: Ubuntu System Panel. It does take a bit of commandline to install, but just follow the procedure described under the Installation menu.

The panel gives you the stuff that I liked in Vista. There is a box where you can filter your applications. I’ve tried to use gnome-do for this, but I prefer a more visual way of working.

A great tool!

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu

I’ve given up in AWN. Back to the good old, boring, gnome-panel days. AWN is just too unstable to use on my company laptop. Try giving a presentation when AWN decides to show a huge, unremovable, UPDATE icon at the bottom of your screen…

GUI, Linux AWN