Stupid Old Hardware

Today I took about an hour to play with some old boxes that I still have lying around -more like hidden in closets- on the house, the all time beauty Quicksilver, the Powermac from halcyon (PPC) days and an ancient Celeron, or I don't know "what kind of crap CPU it has", but has 1 GB RAM, and a DVI NVIDIA video card, AKA: Zeus.

The idea was to see if they even boot, and if they do, try to test a lightweight Linux Mint XFCE (32 bits of course) on Zeus and Ubuntu Mate (PPC, of course) on the Quicksilver.

Zeus booted all-right to an Ubuntu 10.04, and the damned CD-ROM (remember those???) refused to work for quite a while, when it did, it was impossible to boot from it; go figure.
Gave it a try booting from a USB, but I had even less luck. With the Quicksilver I had no luck at all, impossible to make it boot from the CD-ROM, although, it did boot A Ok onto Tiger (remember that glorious OS?).

Total fail on this matter, but, ITOH, I don't know why I even bother, those boxes, specially Zeus, are a total a complete piece of crap, I should throw it to the garbage.
The Quicksilver is really beauty to look at, but both would make a terrible desktop experience nowadays.

Unity is not my thing

After close to a month of testing on my T60 I have to go back to Linux Mint MATE. Unity was good, rather snappy actually (that was surprise), but the Global Menu implementation drives me completely crazy, I really can't understand how on Earth they did such a thing. 

I love the Global Menu approach, the idea, to me it makes total sense, no matter how big the screen or its resolution; but why, why, why they had to make it only visible on mouse over?

It seems like a really moronic idea.

Other than that, I had a couple of serious glitches, that is lockups, doing stupid and trivial things like dragging a couple of video files onto GNOME Player... The kind of lockpus  that requires an X Window restart.

So, yeah MATE might look ancient and there no Global Menu -at least with an easy setup- on Linux Mint, but it delivers.

gsetting the Unity

A couple of Unity settings I've setup on the Thinkpad T60 so far.

gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime show-date true
gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime show-day true
gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime time-format 24-hour
gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.session show-real-name-on-panel false
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface toolbar-style icons
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor "0.8"

Most of those a close to a trademark of the stuff I configure on every box, except for the first four, which are Unity specific.

Give Unity a chance

Installed Precise, a plain vanilla one this time, on the Thinkpad T60 a couple of days ago.

Wanted to give it a spin and use a real Global menu once again.
It seems quite snappy, even on the T60.
Guess its a keeper.

D'load sh*t lappie

Made a lean and mean install on the ancient Dell Inspiron 1000 lappie.
Went with an Ubuntu Minimal install, and on top of it a barebones XFCE; the whole thing took about 2 hours tops.
768 MB of RAM and a 80 GB HDD.
The thing feels pretty snappy.
I'm having a bit of trouble configuring the mouse pointer and getting the CAPSLOCK working as and extra Ctrl key.
Guess I'll have to use the old X Window DOT files config magic.

A year at Last(fm)

16 thousand plays on a year... It's quite a number I guess...

BTW, the problems I was experiencing the other day scrobbling played songs seems to be over, at least for the moment.

The only thing, the only annoyance that remains, just like the first day since Precise Pangolin's update, is that scrobbling from Rhythmbox works awfully bad.

The current Ubuntu desktop

Even tho the calendar says it isn't, summer is upon us...

No more scrobbling for you!

It finally went kaput this morning... It just keeps adding the played songs to the queue.
During the last couple of days I was having problems scrobbling songs from VLC as well.
Too bad, I love gathering statistics on the way I listen to music.

The current GNOME 3 extensions

Installed a couple more today.

The current GNOME 3 extensions

Finally, after 20 days of Gnome 3 on Stilgar I finally caved in and installed a couple of Extensions...
For the moment, those will do.

The current Ubuntu desktop

With a slight 80's twist.

Scrobbling to Last.fm from VLC

This seem to be easy enough, but nevertheless I had to enable an extra setting (the one on the first screenshot) in order to get the whole thing up & running for good.

VLC > Tools > Preferences

And then set that to "Show settings" > "All"
Interface > Control Interfaces > and enable "Submission of played songs to last.fm"

Then goto Audioscrobbler and complete yout login info for Last.fm.

You are done. It scrobbles songs, but only after they have been played in their entirety, there is no "Currently Listening".

This thing with the Suspend

Well, this come back from suspend to hieroglyphs -or rather, "login back from suspend to hieroglyphs"- just because it actually happens after resuming the suspend, and after login back in onto a Gnome desktop session, has me totally and completely fed up.

Last Saturday installed a bunch of updates on Usul, a kernel, X Window server, the works... I thought that after that things might improve... But they didn't.
Another thing... The now old problem that used to force me to edit the "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" after each update to regain the ability to increase or reduce brightness seems to be fixed.
It is something I guess...

Gnome 3: Smaller title bars on Metacity

Been using the T410 non stop for the last 10 days or so. With the maxxed RAM it makes a magnificent machine.
Gnome Shell Remix -that is, Gnome 3- flies on it, when it comes to Linux, everything works A Ok on the laptop, software or hardware wise... It has only two drawbacks, the screen sucks, really, really sucks; and the speakers are weak, and I mean really, but, really weak.
Besides that, the screen only has 1280x800, so it gets kind cramped sometimes...

I've modified a bit the default Metacity theme, reducing the title bar size, which originally its gigantic, BTW...
On the file "/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml", edited the lines:

On frame_geometry name="normal":

<!--    <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="9"/> -->
        <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="5"/>

And on frame_geometry name="max":

<!--   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="8"/>  -->
       <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="4"/>

The result of this can be seen on the latest screenshot.
I've done something similar in the past, but that was for the Metacity theme used on the Fallback Mode.

The current Ubuntu desktop

(It was time for an Ubuntu desktop post!! Even tho, this one is actually a GNOME Shell Remix one..)

The setup I'm using at the moment.
As usual, very much towards the standards.

Chromium closes all open tabs

These last few days I've been using Usul (with Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix) a lot, like all the time, specially now with the maxxed RAM.
Trying to use Chromium as my day to day browser too, so now becomes really important to correct that BS about closing all open tabs when the main window is closed.
Extensions to the rescue!
Another extension, or add on, that I now find essential on Chromium:

Window Close Protector

gsettings galore!

The gsettings configurations I have at the moment on Usul, with its 14" @1280x800 screen.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface menus-have-icons true
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface toolbar-style icons
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor "0.8"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.clock show-date true
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface 'buttons-have-icons' true

Usul moves a notch up

Maxxed the RAM to 8 GB, just now.
Testing it right now while posting this.
Gnome 3 feels mighty snappy.

Usul's xorg.conf, another go...

What you know...
It's been a year or so, and the NVIDIA card (on the Thinkpad T410) has the same problem than while running Lucid Lynx.
The keyboard shortcut to lower or brighten the LCD doesn't work, it does launch the OSD icons for both up & down, but it doesn't actually do dink.
On the same laptop, with Lucid, it was necessary to do something similar.
Not a big deal.

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Default Device"
        Driver          "nvidia"
        Option          "NoLogo"                "True"
        Option          "RegistryDwords"        "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

And yet another one...

The third one (so far???) of those Fuzzy Panels on GNOME 3.
It seems like this has to be a software problem that goes beyond Unity; or maybe a hardware problem with the NVIDIA driver?