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Virtues of Window Managers

Posted by Eitan Fri, 07 Apr 2006 17:46:00 GMT

I have been using linux on the desktop for about a year now. I do love it.

Like most people, I do have a penchant for a great desktop and lots of critical opinions about what makes a good desktop.

I must admit recalling using windows with joy a decade ago and how productive I could be in that environment (windows 3.1, windows 95).

The two virtues I look for in a good window manager are:

  1. performance
  2. stays out of your way, allowing you to be productive

ok, now that I think of it: keyboard accessibility is also very important to me.

As I try to rate Gnome and KDE against these qualities, I find that Gnome has had less than perfect performance but has done a good job staying out of your way. I also rank it highly on keyboard accessibility.

With KDE the opposite seems to be true: the performance is great, but I found myself continually futzing with it, being distracted from the work I actually needed to do.

So I have been a Gnome user, and a happy one at that. I'm also looking forward to Gnome 2.14 and Dapper Drake, which will improve the performance of the window manager.

I'm also looking forward to a year from now where Core Duo notebook prices will be lower, and the improved performance that will come with it.

I suppose I should also say a word about the MacOS. It stays out of your way nicely and it's fast. The problem is that it ran on hardware that was slower than a snail (the G4). They fooled a lot of people into thinking the G4 was a fast processor. Anyhow I digress and Apple is not what this blog entry is about.

So I am writing this as I download Xubuntu: Ubuntu + Xfce window manager. I don't know why I overlooked Xfce before. I just checked out the screenshots and the movies and it appears to be what I have been looking for all these years. The price of ignorance is indeed high. I hope in a future blog to recount how things go between me and Xfce.

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I give up!

Posted by eitan Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:16:03 GMT

..on Linux for doing presentations.

First there's no support for dynamic video mirroring. I can get over that.

But the presentation software landscape is so unbelievably barren..I tried Open Office 2 but to say that it is terrible would be giving it too much credit. KDE usually really is on top of things but KPresenter is much worse than OO2. I mean, I don't think anyone's tried to do a presentation using that software.

What does that say about people who use Linux? Does no one give presentations? Maybe there's a magic distribution. I thought I was taking it pretty safe when I decided to go with Ubuntu, as far as I can tell, is the most popular distribution, according to distrowatch.org.

I guess I'll be giving S5 a whirl next..

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Open Sesame

Posted by eitan Tue, 17 Jan 2006 22:38:59 GMT

One of the small little but valuable features I used to like on macosx (before switching to Ubuntu last Summer) was the command-line open command. You could just type open index.html and the file would pop up in the a web browser. I used it all the time.

I'm not "guru of the universe" and surely something like this exists for linux but for some reason thirty minutes searching the synaptic package manager did not yield anything.

So one day I finally decided to turn on my brain for a change and in five minutes hacked this:

  #!/usr/bin/ruby -w

  def suffix(file_name)
    file_name.split(".").last()
  end

  map = {
           "pdf" => "kpdf",
           "directory" => "nautilus",
           "html" => "epiphany",
           "htm" => "epiphany",
           "xls" => "gnumeric",
           "csv" => "gnumeric",
           "txt" => "kate",
           "gif" => "eog",
           "jpg" => "eog",
           "png" => "eog",
           "xml" => "gedit"
         }

  file_name = ARGV[0]
  key = (File.directory?(file_name)) ? "directory" : suffix(file_name)
  app_name = map[key]

  fork do
    puts "invoking #{app_name}..\n"
    exec "#{app_name} #{file_name}"
  end

I've been using it daily for a while now and I like it. Over time I've built myself a few other little utilities. A recent one is merge for merging data with an erb template. I use 'show' a lot. It breaks down a path-like structure into multiple line entries so one can actually read the foresaken string. I use it like this:

  eitan@ubuntu:~/bin$ show path
  PATH:
  /usr/local/bin
  /usr/local/sbin
  /sbin
  /usr/sbin
  /bin
  /usr/bin
  ...

.. or show classpath etc..

Another one that is a real time saver when the time comes to import a new project into subversion is svnize which will automatically restructure your project in the trunk/tags/branches hierarchy suitable for doing the import.

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NetworkManager

Posted by eitan Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:21:40 GMT

I just installed NetworkManager on my Ubuntu laptop.

I can't stop saying it: I love this environment. It keeps getting better and better. It was no big deal for me up until now to invoke a script to update my wifi network settings that did something like this:

iwconfig eth2 essid "new one"
sudo dhclient eth2

Anyhow, now it's old history. Now on my gnome desktop I've got a nice little wifi GUI that allows me to switch networks.

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