Openbox

This morning, I received this anonymous email message: CrunchBang is amazing! I have a netbook with only 1GB of RAM and it zooms along very fast. I appreciate what you have made, and I would be heart broken if this distro were to ever cease. ... [More] Please keep it up Mr. Newborough! I guess it is possible that my recent posts about GNOME might have triggered this. So, to be clear, yes, I really like GNOME, but no, I am not about to stop working on CrunchBang. That said, like many other Linux users, I occasionally like to play around with other desktops and distros. I believe that experimentation is a healthy pursuit, it helps to provide ideas and stops the rot from setting in. At the moment, I am mostly experimenting with GNOME, but it will not be long until I return to using Openbox. P.S. Maybe now is not a good time to mention my little foray into the world of Windows 8? --Tagged: crunchbang linux, gnome [Less]

The view out the window in my previous and current overseas offices: Talisay City (Negros Occidental, Philippines) and Sheung Wan (Hong Kong).

Fala, Mução!

Shakira do Amazonas - O Amaro

The parking lot for Fremont Older Open Space Preserve adjoins a golfing range. There seems to be some difference of opinion regarding the responsibility if an errant golf ball should hit a car. One sign declares DANGER: Flying golf balls, Park at ... [More] your own risk while the one right under it, put up by the open space district, advises Golfers are responsible for damage caued by golf balls I just hope I never have to find out who's right. [Less]

Yesterday, I admitted that I got it wrong about GNOME 3 (it really is very nice). I think my admission came as a surprise to some people, I know it came as a surprise to me. Why did it come as a surprise? Because I was holding on to the ... [More] misconception that GNOME is sluggish and resource intensive. I am not sure where or when I came to this conclusion, but it simply is not true. This last week, I have found that it performs very nicely and it has been flying along on my machines. I don’t know how widely my previous misconception is shared amongst non GNOME users, but I have certainly heard it said by others before. As a case in point, yesterday, after stating that I was thinking about trying GNOME on a less powerful system, jotapesse commented: I would very much like to know the performance you get from an Intel Atom machine (like your EeePC 1000) as I work with 2 of them (EeePC 1000H and an EeeBoxPC 1501P) with Xfce 4.10 (with window composition enabled) wonderfully. I don’t expect Gnome3 to work satisfactorily… am I wrong? So, this morning, I installed it on my old Eee PC 1000 and the results surprised me again. It performs just fine, in fact, I might be stating the obvious, but GNOME Shell works really well on the small screen format. In the couple of hours that I used it, the only noticeable difference that I could perceive was that the window animations were not quite as smooth as they are on my more powerful systems. Still, nothing critical and certainly not enough to put me off using it. Now, I don’t have any real metrics to back this up, but, I would say that it performs as well as any Openbox or Xfce set-up that I have previously used on my Eee PC. Surprised? I was. --Tagged: gnome, gnome-shell, linux [Less]

Over a year ago, I wrote a post entitled “GNOME 3 — This is the end, maybe”. My post was a response to a post on Dedoimedo entitled “Gnome 3 — This is the end, it seems”, where I basically agreed with the Dedoimedo summary: Totally ... [More] counterintuitive, inefficient, not really productive, the lack of panels and right-click functionality is a sore, annoying loss. Power users will find the polished, rounded looks nothing more than a costly distraction to their work. Now, as a self-confessed flip-flopper, I am executing my right to change my mind (feel free to read as an admission to being totally wrong). I now believe that GNOME 3 is the complete opposite of “counterintuitive, inefficient, not really productive” and I am finally beginning to see that it has huge potential. I have been playing around with it on Debian Sid for the past week and I have really enjoyed the experience. In fact, I have enjoyed it so much, I now have it running on a couple of machines. Sometimes, it feels good when you realise you were wrong, very wrong. --Tagged: debian, gnome, gnome-shell [Less]

Oh hi! I may fail at staying up with my blog, but I just wanted to pop in and say that Julie and I just celebrated our one-year anniversary with a 4-day trip to Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan. We wandered around town, ate, hiked, and laid on the ... [More] beach. It was an enjoyable time with a truly amazing girl. One great time among many. Thank you to our friends and family who wish us well! [Less]

Stephen Tobolowsky shares some behind the scenes memories of Sneakers, an all-time favourite film of mine, and finishes with his thoughts on scriptwriter Phil Alden Robinson: Years later I ran into Phil at the symphony. I asked him I how he was ... [More] able to come up with such a great script. He blushed and said he had worked on it for nine years. I know spending a long time writing something doesn’t guarantee success. But not giving up on a good idea almost always does. Permalink [Less]

In setting up a laptop -- Debian "Squeeze" with a Gnome 2 desktop -- for an invalid who will be doing most of her computing from bed, we hit a snag. Two snags, actually: both related to the switching between the trackpad and an external trackball. ... [More] Disabling and re-enabling the trackpad First, the trackpad gets in the way when she's typing. "Disable touchpad while typing" was already set, but it doesn't actually work -- the mouse was always moving when her palm brushed against it. On her desktop computer, she's always used a Logitech trackball -- never really got the hang of mice, but that trackball always worked well for her. And fortunately, unlike a mouse, a trackball works just fine from bed. Once the trackball is working, there's really no need to have the trackpad enabled. So why not just turn it off when the external trackball is there? I thought I'd once seen a preference like that ... but it was nowhere to be found in the Gnome 2 desktop. It turns out the easiest way to disable a trackpad is this: synclient TouchpadOff=1 Using 0 instead of 1 turns it back on. So we gave her shell aliases for both these commands. A web search will show various approaches to writing udev rules to run something like that automatically, but she felt it was easy enough to type a command when she switches modes, so we're going with that for now. Emulate the middle button on an external mouse or trackball We thought we were done -- until we tried to paste that alias into her shell and discovered that 2-button paste doesn't work for external mice in Squeeze. Usually, when you have a mouse-like device that has only two buttons, you can click the left and right buttons together to emulate a middle click. She'd been using that on her old Ubuntu Lucid install, and it works on pretty much every trackpad I've used. But it didn't work with the USB trackball on Squeeze. Gnome used to have a preference for middle button emulation, but it's gone now. There's a program you can install called gpointing-device-settings that offers a 2-button emulation setting ... but it doesn't save the settings anywhere. And since it's a GUI program you can't make it part of your login or boot process -- you'd have to go through and click to set it every time. Not happening. 2-buttom emulation is an X setting -- one of the settings that used to be specified in Xorg.conf, and now wanders around to different places on every distro. A little web searching didn't turn up a likely candidate for Squeeze, but it did turn up a way that's probably more distro independent: the xinput command. After installing xinput, you need the X ID of the external mouse or trackball. xinput list should show you something like this (plus more stuff for keyboards and possibly other devices): $ xinput list Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=10 [slave pointer (2)] Kensington Kensington USB/PS2 Orbit id=13 [slave pointer (2)] Once you have the id of the external device, list its properties: $ xinput list-props 13 ~ 9:01PM Device 'Kensington Kensington USB/PS2 Orbit': Device Enabled (132): 1 ... long list of other properties ... Evdev Middle Button Emulation (303): 0 Evdev Middle Button Timeout (304): 50 ... more properties ... You can see that middle button emulation is disabled (0). So turn it on: $ xinput --set-prop 13 "Evdev Middle Button Emulation" 1 Click both buttons together, and sure enough -- a middle button paste! I added that to the alias that turns the trackpad off -- though of course, it could also be added to a udev rule that fires automatically when the mouse is plugged in. [Less]