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!
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:
Download sonyvideoswitch.sh and move it to /etc/acpi
# /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.
I’ve been fighting with some stuff in Ubuntu that is pretty straight forward on Windows.
The first was as easy as it gets: editing word documents. It seems that the word documents that OpenOffice delivers have a quite bad layout. Especially the content index is lousy. I must say I’m annoyed by this, I really try to use FOS for everything, but in my job I encounter a lot of MS Word documents. I need to be able to create and edit them.
The second was: we (Componence) switched to Exchange 2007. Ah well, that’s really old, so I guess Evolution supports that. It doesn’t. F*ck! It will be supported in the next release of Gnome, if they (Novell) are able to resolve some licence problems.
The third is that I’d like to be able to use an extra monitor on my laptop. I’ve been using the external monitor as a mirror for ages now, but a real spanning desktop would be nice. It turns out that this is really simple. Why didn’t anyone try to implement that in a way that doesn’t require any config file changing? This is way too simple, and possible for nearly a year already!
The last point made me find a weird thing in Compiz: it can’t handle a viewport larger then 2048 wide or 2048 high. Ehm?
The word file and exchange crap made me install Windows in a Virtual box. I have this open constantly and I spend a lot of my time working in Windows again. I hate it!
The webcam of my Sony is now working! http://download.tuxfamily.org/arakhne/pool/ricoh-webcam-r5u870/
[Update 2 Nov 2008]
The URL has been updated: http://wiki.mediati.org/R5u870. But please mind that the current release doesn’t work on the latest releases of the kernel. The fix is in progress.
I’ve been using OpenOffice 3 beta for a while now and I must say it’s much better then 2.4. I contains some of the features I’ve always liked in MS Office, like comments at the side of the document and language selection. Both were pretty crappy in 2.4… I also have the feeling that the MS Word file format support has improved a bit, at least the bug that a document becomes read only when you add an index (how do you build a bug like that???) has been fixed.
There is still room for improvement. For example: it’s still not possible to accept changes with the right mouse key. This would really make merging changes much easier then it is now.
I hope that the support of the ODF format in MS Office will come fast, then I can just send ODF document to my collegues and clients. That would really make life much better, finally kill that idiotic MS Word format!
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).
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
I’m a real fan of Ubuntu, but I’m willing to try someting else when it’s better.
I’ve downloaded Fedora 9 Gnome and KDE4. The Gnome version is boring, but it works fine. The KDE4 version is brilliant. I must say that I’ve always been using Gnome, but KDE4 is really good. It looks much more modern then Gnome and the features (plasmoids for example) are much more up to date.
But then, I was testing Fedora.
With linux I run into my laziness. Windows is easy: you buy a laptop, boot it, it works. That simple. But then you have a system based on crap technology and you very little customizing possibilities and I like customizing… I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it worked perfect from the beginning, nearly all my hardware was supported, or I could get it to work. With Fedora not everything works, and it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work to get it to work.
The fn-keys don’t work. This is a common problem with the Sony laptops. Ubuntu solved this, Fedora didn’t. That sucks. I’m not able to set the brightness in Fedora, this bothers me because the display of the Sony is very bright. In Ubuntu it does work.
Frankly that did it for me. I like customizing, but I don’t want to search the web and find that stuff as trivial as the support of brightness is not supported in an OS.
On the positive side I must say that the KDE4 is really, really good. It’s much better then Gnome. Everything from the looks until the functionality is just a step better. But it’s not finished. When I see the prereleases of KDE4 I see that they are moving in the right direction, but they are just not there yet.
I’ll stay with Ubuntu for a while, but with the 9 release Fedora really made a huge step towards the usability for the general user.
BTW. I’ve also taken a look at Kubuntu. That looks rather pale when compared to Fedora. I understand that Ubuntu didn’t want to take KDE4 into the LTS verison, but KDE3.5 is real crap. It’s completely outdated.
I will try it. I still have a weak spot for Fedora. RedHat was not the first Linux I’ve tried, but it was the first that worked for me. I like the Fedora project a lot, but they’ve lost a lot on usuability, that’s why I switched to Ubuntu. But I keep trying every new release. I hope that this live cd comes futher then telling me it find the CD after booting….
This thing has been in my mind for a long time now. There is a connection between the open source community and Enterprise 2.0. They both describe distibuted responsibility and the use of web 2.0 tooling.
Look at the pages under: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes. This describes the organisation of the Ubuntu community. I’ve been reading this for about an hour now and I’ve seen 10ths of things we can use in Componence.
I’m going to do more research on this to find out how the settled enterprise can learn from the anarchistic open source community.
Finally I have suspend working. My hero is on the ubuntu forums. Life has just improved a lot 
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