Unhappy with Gnome-Shell and/or Unity? XFCE4.8 to the rescue!

I don’t like Unity and I don’t like Gnome-Shell.
For me its not productive and/or useful.
XFCE4.8 fills that gap for me.
I am using Xubuntu Natty and the XFCE4.8 packages are flooding in.
Works great and am not missing Gnome.
Are you unhappy with the developments in Gnome and/or Ubuntu?
Move to Xubuntu Natty or any other distro delivering XFCE4.8.

A “Green” OS?

How environmentally friendly can an operating system be ?

I wondered about that when i saw on Distrowatch that a new beta of VLOS is out.
Vlos and Sabayon are based on Gentoo,
Gentoo is a source based distro, meaning you have to compile apps and updates yourself.
Is it good to compile or is it better to use packages ready to install?
Environmentalists would say packages.
And honestly I have to agree with them.
Compiling is a waste of energy if you can get ready compiled packages instead.
So if you compile just for the sake of “look at me compiling!” think again.
RPM’s, DEB’s , PKG’s and other package formats help to keep the energy usage low.

Gentoo is still a great distro though.

Tuxicity

New default artwork for Debian “Squeeze”

In Debian Project News – November 22nd, 2010 Artwork for Debian Squeeze has been revealed, and i think its a pretty good choice!

Check out Space Fun!

Tuxicity

Faenza Icon Theme not only for Ubuntu!

The post ‘ Faenza Icon Theme Undergoes Major Upgrade, Tons of New Icons Included‘ pissed me off.

ITS NOT ONLY FOR UBUNTU !!

This beautiful icon theme is very easy to install by simply downloading this zip-file from tiheum.deviantart.com/.

Unpack the zip-file in Nautilus; “right click the zip-file and select extract here”

Then with your terminal:

cd /path/to/faenza_icons_by_tiheum-d2v6x24

Then;

./INSTALL

And the icons will be installed locally after asking some questions about your preferences.

You can uninstall the icons by running

./UNINSTALL

In your terminal.

Cheers,

Tuxicity

Firefox 4 in Fedora

There are two ways to install Firefox 4.0 Beta7 In Fedora using a repository.
There is a Remi repository and a Spot repository.
In my opinion The Spot option is your best choice, and Remi the easiest, since all you have to do to set up the Remi repository is to install a remi-release-rpm matching the Fedora version you use; Fedora 12 users should opt for Remi since Spot only has repo’s available for Fedora 14 and -13.

The Spot version of Firefox is smoother and the opening and closing of tabs look better (animated).

For the spot repository do as normal user in your terminal (fedora 13 and 14 only!)

wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo

Then as root:

mv fedora-firefox4.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

yum install firefox4

Installing Firefox from the Remi repo is after installing the remi-release-rpm also yum install firefox4.

Enjoy,

Tuxicity.

To my surprise wget is not in the default Fedora 14 installation, so if you choose for the Spot repo option first as root:

yum install wget

Change Bootsplash in Fedora 14

The default bootsplash ( or Plymouth theme) in Fedora 14 is pretty boring, not to say ugly.

Fedora has more themes available, to install them all; As root:

yum install plymouth-theme-charge plymouth-theme-fade-in plymouth-theme-script plymouth-theme-solar plymouth-theme-spinfinity

That is 5 themes to choose from!
I chose plymouth-theme-spinfinity for its professional look. It requires two commands to do this.

As root;

plymouth-set-default-theme spinfinity
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

That should to it, if you decide to use another theme don’t forget to do the second command to make it work.

Have fun,

Tuxicity.

Thanks to The Fedora Design team!

Ubuntu Karmic/9.10, adding the PPA and its key

Lets say you would like to add chromium daily builds PPA repository to your sources.list and import its key:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily

Thats it!!

the repository is stored in :

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium-daily-ppa-karmic.list

the key is automagically added.

Tuxicity

this is only for Ubuntu9.10 (karmic) and above

Thunderbird 3

The Thunderbird3 package has arrived in Archlinux, and makes Thunderbird2 instantly obsolete.

When I started Thunderbird3 it asked me 3 (three) questions.

1. How do you want your name displayed
2. Whats your E-Mail adress
3. Whats the password, with a tic box for remembering password.

After that Thunderbird probed and detected my Gmail settings, including imap, ssl and what not

And thats all I had to do to set up my (Gmail) account.

Thunderbird3 rocks! , use it.

Tuxicity.

Trying Chromium

It has been a a while since i did some blogging here, but since I am having a look at Cromium for Linux, I thought it would be a good idea to make some notes.

Chromium can be enhanced with extensions and themes. I changed my theme to Earthy and added 2 extensions, one for the weather and one for blocking ads.

The theme I chose matched nicely with my Ubuntu theme. (I use ArchLinux) A nice feature in the settings it that you are able to hide the system bar, and use gtk+ theme.

There is no clutter in Chromium, the tabs look smooth, and its a pleasant browser to work with.

If you want to browse anonymously you can simply open an “incognito window”.

It hardly uses any resources, even with the 9 tabs I have opened opened.

I like Chromium, it might become my default browser.

Tuxicity.

Xorg.conf Removed – Part 2

Everything works fine ? ,  yes, except for xrandr unfortunately.

I had to re-add xorg.conf to get my TV-out to work.

This  morning I read a “First Look” story on the recently released 2.6.28 kernel, from ars technica. Specially the the “Graphics Execution Manager” (GEM) interested me; it is one of the additions and GEM was said to boost framerates by between 50 and 60 percent for Intel 915 graphics hardware.

The 2.6.28 kernel is available in the abs of Arch Linux, so I decided to build it from abs and install it to see if it would improve the functionality of my Intel graphics controller, especially xrander (you never know…).

After install of the fresh kernel I removed xorg.conf (again).
Rebooted, to initiate the new kernel, hooked up my TV, ran xrander – -auto on it and…. It worked!

I can watch videos on my TV now, without needing a  xorg.conf.

Tuxicity