xabbott.blg

I’m trying out with Mac4Lin, a very complete theme that attempts to mimic OS X. It includes themes, skins, and icons for compiz, metacity, pidgin, audacious, etc. While it isn’t original art the package is very impressive and I appreciate the effort.

The documentation seems to be a bit dated but it is easy enough to install if you are already into themes.

While not necessarily a part of Mac4Lin, I decided to try out Mac menu bar Gnome panel applet. I was very surprised how well it work. I was disappointed that XUL apps don’t work with it. Basically all non GTK2 applications will not work with it.

I highly doubt I will stick to this setup but I do wish there were more Linux themes that were this complete. Unfortunately the ones that are tend to mimic OS X or Vista.

I typically hate how “code” fonts look on forums and websites. So I was planning to edit my .fonts.conf to replace whatever font they used with something I did like. So the first two websites I wanted to change were using “monaco” as a first choice. I knew it was a mac font but had never seen it.

Out of curiosity I went looking for it. This was actually harder to find than I thought it would be. I found a direct link to it here, thanks to this list of programmer fonts.

I like how it looks so no need to edit fonts.conf!

I recently had an itch to try KDE again after looking into KDEmod. It’s a tweaked and modularized KDE designed for Archlinux. The installation was very easy, between the installation guide and FAQ you should have no problem.

Upon first loading it I’m presented with a clean desktop (no icons), Arch wallpaper and a Arch branded KDE menu. It’s not the default K menu but Suse’s Kickoff menu. This was the first time I had used it and I really liked it.

The second thing I notice is how little I’ve actually installed. While I’m used to a KDE install leaving me with about four or five programs for every task. KDEmod is thankfully much more frugal. If I recall I had a text editor, file/web browser, control panel, and I think that’s about it. You’ll end up installing exactly what you want!

Along with the menu change there are other little patches applied here and there. These patches range from security, usability, and eyecandy. They really show the attention to detail to this project. I did appreciate most of them, however the Icon execute feedback was a bit buggy for me. This could have been due to using Beryl with it. Another issue I had with Beryl was that the pager wouldn’t work consistently.

Other than that the only issue I had was with my fonts looking bad. That was easily fixed with a visit to the control panel.

I won’t be switching to KDE but KDEmod does present one of the nicest KDE desktops I’ve used. It was stable, polished, and really fit the Arch way. It’s even more impressive when you consider it’s done by one lone Archlinux fan. If you like KDE or just want to revisit it I highly recommend checking it out.

I really like Beryl, it’s fun and does offer more than just eyecandy. After reading a Beryl rant it was nice to see someone write an article on how useful it can be. There’s three in total, and two of them include videos.

While Jimmac’s mouse cursor has a few different names in various distros odds are you are using it. It’s been updated check it out.

None of this is new but interesting if you haven’t seen it before. A forum post today reminded me of them and I thought I’d share. BumpTop and Lowfat have proposed interfaces that are 3D. Unlike current 3D desktop interfaces, they are not converting what we already use.

They both use 3D to try for organic file management, similar to how you deal with papers or photos around you. I find them both very interesting but I don’t think this is the future of desktop file management. I believe they would work very well for tablet PCs or possibly some kind of photo album appliance. If you just want to see them in action, here are the videos both in Flash. Other formats available on the respective websites.
BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype
Lowfat Preview

Ok so my last Metisse post was really just a Mandriva rant. I compiled and installed it on Arch today. The website’s build documentation is good and easy to follow. Basically just configure, make, install. I did use -enable-glx-x86 and –enable-mmx on the Metisse configure.

Once it was all installed you have a few ways to start it, which are explained here. I did it the “easy” way. I already boot into runlevel 3 and run startx. So I just created a new .xinitrc for Metisse with the following in it.

Xmetisse -ac -depth 24 -geometry 1280x1024 :1 >& .Xmetisse-log &
metisse-start-fvwm >& .compositor-log &
urxvt # this will allow you to terminate this session by typing "exit" and to
# restart the compositor using metisse-start-fvwm if it ever crashes
killall Xmetisse

Pretty much ripped from the official instructions with the terminal, resolution, and color depth changed.

I immediatly noticed two things my fonts and cursor. My fonts looked very very small, I assume it had something to do with a dpi setting. The cursor and the area around it was covered by a large flickering black box. I opened up Firefox and started reading how to do all the cool stuff I’ve seen in the videos.

I move some windows around, zoom them, spin them, etc. You can do all of this with hotkeys or mouse clicks on certain areas. I try to take a screen shot with Scrot but it only captured the background. Reading further I see you need to use a capture hotkey that outputs to jpg.

I then start to open up many windows and attempt use the multiple desktops. This whole process is very slow and clumsy.

You can’t drag the window to another desktop. You can’t grab the little window representations in the pager. I right clicked the window border itself hoping for a menu, nope. You have to right click the menu icon in the window title bar, this gives you a copy of the pager which is same size as the one already on the screen.

The navigation was just as bad, moving to another desktop makes the windows appear to slide away or into view but slowly. Also zooming out to view all nine desktops didn’t make navigation any better. When you click on a desktop while zoomed out you have to watch the background image slowly move from one desktop to your destination, then you can zoom back in.

It wasn’t all bad though, one feature that is unique to Metisse is the ability to cut and paste parts from an application. This worked surprisingly well and unlike many of the other features was fairly intuitive. I was able to cut out the file explorer from Rox, my Gmail status and Google search bar from Firefox, then paste them into one window. I don’t have any personal uses for this but just seeing it in action was nice. It functions in such a way that it is still affecting and being affected by the original. If you resize the original windows or close them your “custom” window will not look right anymore.

The only other note worthy thing was the quasi radial menu. If you held and dragged the corner of the window this nice menu would appear around your cursor. I’ve always wondered why this type of a menu wasn’t used more often.

Recalling the Metisse videos I can’t help but be reminded of a subpar movie with all the good parts in the trailer. It’s not ready for prime time (yet) and I have no idea why Mandriva is shipping it with thier live disc.

I just found out about the site of this artist named David Lanham. He’s got some awesome artwork, wallpapers, icons, etc. Someone ported his Amora theme to GTK+Emerald and it looks awesome. I couldn’t find a port of the Amora icons so I am currently working on that. Obligatory screen shot….

I recently downloaded and tried the live distribution Mandriva One 2007, all for one simple reason:Metisse. I like eye candy and saw the videos. Metisse is this very interesting effect filled desktop similar in my opinion to Enlightenment. Looking at the videos the features seemed a lot more useful than Beryl’s.

I hadn’t used Mandriva before although I had used Mandrake 6 about eight years ago. Anyway, tried it in my Toshiba notebook first. The boot screen and wallpaper are an eye burning orange. Once I am actually loaded into the desktop I can not click anything. When clicks would register it’d be for a split second. I then figured I would just navigate with the keyboard. Although I was able to rotate some windows like that, it still wasn’t pleasant. I switched to terminal and played with xorg. I tried several things in my attempt to fix it but to no avail.

I then tried it on an a 6 year old Dell. Similar problems…all my clicks would register a fvwm menu. I wasn’t able to do anything more than I did on the notebook.

Finally I tried it on my main desktop where it did actually function but the poor performance of Mandriva just made the experience underwhelming. It was honestly one of the worst performing live disc I’ve used. I’m not sure how much of this was due to Mandriva and how much was Metisse itself. I’m going to attempt to compile it for my current distro or I’ll try it again if I see another distribution offer it.

Wallpaper: Codename 47

GTK theme: Murrina PF-Y Blue

Emerald theme: PF-4

Metacity: System G or Murrine Metacity

Icons: PF Icons or Ubuntu Human Azul