Gnome

Screen estate

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Now that I have new shiny monitor, and running in 1600x900, I'm finding myself with an awfull lot of screen real estate. Now, I'm a person who likes a desktop that is clean & functional and doesn't distract me from doing productive work. That's why I prefer Gnome above KDE, as it offers a more sober desktop environment. It's not that I don't like desktop bling-bling, but bells & whistles should not distract me. That's why I'm using the trailfocus feature from Compiz, so that inactive windows get transparant, and the focussed window gets my full attention.

That's why I also like maximized windows. But on 1600x900, a maximized window is 30% too wide. Text in Thunderbird & Firefox gets smeared over a too wide distance, which makes it more difficult to read. So I was thinking of using the right part of the screen for displaying system information & other stuff. Many aeons ago, while my preferred window manager was WindowMaker, it offered an applet system which could be docked on a side of your screen, like you see in this picture. Gnome offers the same thing with its applets, but recently more bling has been added in the form of screenlets. The problem with this is that maximized windows cover the dock area, so that you need mouse or keyboard actions to make these visible, and that's not the idea.

With the latest versions of the Sidebar screenlet, however, this dock area can be fixed, so that maximizing a window still shows the Sidebar area. My experience however with screenlets is that most of them are still very attention demanding, especially due to the bright colors they use. It takes some time to find screenlets or screenlet themes which offer a sober screenlet experience, so we'll see.

The Sidebar has some other possibilities : I use 2 Gnome Panels, one keeping a window list, and another stacked on top of the first, containing many application launchers. As the Sidebar doesn't get covered by maximized windows, maybe I can now replace the launcher panel with a Mac OSX like panel.

Gnome-splash trouble

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I got some trouble this evening while trying to log in : the gnome-splash window showed me 10 metacity icons, and stopped loading the session. Only a gnome-failsafe would get me into Gnome. Time to browse the bugs.ubuntu.com website. Isn't it a horror to get decent search results in there ? It took me 20 minutes before I gave up, went to bugs.debian.org, and located the error in the gnome-session section within 3 minutes. Ditching my ~/.gnome2/session file solved my problem. Ahh, the quality of products from a bunch of anarchic open-source hackers... Ubuntu, please get some sanity into your BTS !

Same thing for beryl. The project is coding and forking faster than it crashes on my system, and there is only a forum here and there to look for whimpy suggestions of users without any developper confirmation for the proposed solutions.
After several minutes to some hours, Beryl locks up my computer completely. I suspect however that Nvidia is to blame here, maybe in combination with some memory or video card problem. Changing some settings in the advanced settings panel doesn't solve anything. If I choose metacity however as window decorator, the problem is gone.
I'm trying now heliodor, as window decorator instead of metacity. If this on fails, there's no other solution than quit using beryl altogether. Oh no, not the eye candy! Not the precious candy !

Ximians Exchange connector for Evolution now GPL

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Since today, Novell has made its Evolution connector to Exchange available for download under the GPL. The connector will be included in the 2.0 version of Evolution. With the Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, Evolution functions as an Exchange client, enabling users to become full participants in company-wide group scheduling and other collaborative tasks. A good step forward for enterprise Linux desktop users (as I am).

GDesklets

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It has been half a year that Karamba and its kin ruled the KDE desktop with their eye candy. But now Gnome has its own desktop joy called GDesklets.
After playing a bit with GDesklets, I have to admit that they are far more user-friendly and professional looking than its KDE counterpart (sorry, SuperKaramba !)