Recently in GNOME Category

Ubuntu was famous for being brown, even though it was probably half-orange for most of its storied existence. Mark Shuttleworth and Co. mostly blew that notion out of the water in Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS), which is purplish and dark.

And if you really, really hate the button placement on the left side of the windows, there is more than one theme in Lucid's default GNOME desktop that automatically moves those buttons back to the right side of the window.

To access all of these desktop designs, go to System - Preferences - Appearance in the menu and start experimenting. There are eight themes in the default along with a link to get more.

I'm pretty simple about these things, so I looked at what came with the Lucid install and ditched the default Ambiance theme in favor of Radiance. I also dumped the purple wallpaper by clicking on the Background tab and selecting the Cosmos slide-show background, which not only presents a nice outer-space view but periodically changes the image (hence the "slide-show" portion of the name).

As you can see above, the panel and window borders are much lighter in color. I realize that the stars/galaxies/planets backgrounds themselves are dark, but everything else is lighter, and I can always find a new background wallpaper if I get tired of globular clusters and the like.

I don't really care about button placement and knowing full well that I can move them to the right side if I wish, I'm just going to leave them where they are.

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

I've been running FreeBSD for more than a week now - first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it's going very well.

I started with the idea that I'd run the full GNOME desktop with all the apps I used in Debian, and I pretty much have that setup.

But late last week I set up the Fvwm2 window manager - and just like in any other Unix-like OS, running something like Fvwm2 (or Fluxbox, which I also have in this install) does consume fewer resources than GNOME. Not that GNOME is by any means slow in FreeBSD on this hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with 1.2 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM).

But I could see in the top utility that Fvwm was easier on both CPU and RAM.

Not that I'm doing everything in Fvwm2. I'm working right now and am doing so in GNOME.

As I alluded to above, I'm not sure whether or not it has been the case since I did the install of 7.3-release, but it looks like when I use pkg_add to install binary packages that my system is pulling from the 7-stable repository and not the 7.3-release repo.

I noticed because I've had to "force" a couple of packages to install due to slight differences in the versions of dependencies that are already part of the system. I'm unsure whether to a) change PACKAGESITE to point to 7.3-release, b) upgrade the system itself from 7.3-release to 7-stable, c) upgrade to 8.0-release or 8-stable, or d) don't do anything.

At the moment everything is working, so I'm leanign toward answer "d" - doing nothing.

I even solved my X problems, some of which were caused by my starting X with the command startx in a root shell rather than my user shell.

Once I figured that out and then invoked DPMS in my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"

Then I had my screensaver issues solved. The computer goes into regular screensaver mode, then eventually the system turns the screen off entirely, and I can get back from either screensaver mode by moving the mouse.

I even installed a few ports, as opposed to precompiled binary packages, which I generally prefer due to the speed with which they are installed, my own laziness, and my worry about running out of disk space (I'm working with 20 GB total here ....).

I built gThumb from ports because I needed IPTC capability baked in. The ports system in FreeBSD lets you choose this option from a handy menu when you are building the application. I've since found out that gThumb in Debian is built with IPTC support - which is how I discovered that it's exactly what I need for Web photo editing - but gThumb in Ubuntu leaves IPTC out, rendering it mostly useless for my work.

It's great that in FreeBSD building the package from source the way I want/need it is so easy to do.

In order to get CUPS printing working, I had to reinstall a couple of packages for which I used ports.

So I have a nice setup here with GNOME 2.28, Fvwm2, Fluxbox if I decide to use it, all the apps I generally use, and I have all of my user files on this system now. I kept my 3+GB of Thunderbird mail on a USB stick that I can access from this machine, and I've been using Gmail as my main mail client, through which I'm filtering a whole bunch of mail.

I never thought POP-ing down mail with Thunderbird was the best solution, and having to back up that Thunderbird mail, which always takes an eon or two, made me want to continue in that mode even less.

I know Google is targeting ads to me based on what's in my e-mail and documents, but the service is just too good for me to pass it up at this juncture.

I should probably mention again that I do have Java working in my Web browsers, I have Flash 9 installed, even though it's problematic resources-wise (and I have it turned off in Firefox for that reason, leaving Epiphany as my "Flash browser").

Overall, many more things work than don't in this FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, so I think I'll be sticking with it for a while.

Not only have I been able to crash FreeBSD 7.3-release with GNOME by trying to automount FAT partitions on USB-connected drives, but those crashes rendered both the FAT partitions and the ext3 partitions that otherwise could be mounted automatically on those drives, for lack of a better word, unmountable.

I was able to mount the ext3 partitions once again in FreeBSD after a lengthy fsck courtesy of gParted on the Parted Magic live CD.

Then I did it all over again. I'm running fsck on the drives now. They could always be mounted in Parted Magic 4.9, by the way, just not in FreeBSD.

Once the fsck finishes, I'll boot into FreeBSD, make sure the ext3 partitions are mountable, make a backup of my FreeBSD user and relevant configuration files, and then I'll be moving on.

If this was a true test machine, I'd be able to run FreeBSD longer and perhaps figure out some of these issues (many of which are HAL-related, and if not HAL-specific, at least GNOME-specific).

When I ran OpenBSD 4.4 as my desktop OS, I didn't run into these problems. But I also didn't run GNOME, so it's not apples-to-apples between these two BSDs. In OpenBSD, I began with the default Fvwm2 window manager and eventually added Xfce. And I didn't automount anything.

I imaging that getting FreeBSD to work like any Linux distribution that ships with GNOME is doable, but I just don't have the time and expertise to do it.

I got a lot further a lot faster in FreeBSD than I did with OpenBSD in terms of getting my system set up. But if attempting to mount FAT filesystems is enough to crash the system and lead to endless fsck operations, I really can't stay with FreeBSD for my personal production workflow.

I did manage to get Java installed. The binary package didn't work because the dependencies in FreeBSD 7.3-release are too new. For one reason or other, I was unable to get the diablo-jre port to build, but the diablo-jdk port did successfully install the Java development kit — including the runtime, which is all I really needed.

I even got Flash to work in both Firefox and GNOME's Epiphany browser. I followed the instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook, and when they didn't work in Firefox 3.6.1, I replaced that Firefox package with version 3.5.8 and soon had Flash working.

The problem is that the Flash processes — which run as npviewer.bin, I believe — hog up a whole lot of CPU and aren't terribly good about reducing that load when I leave a page that includes Flash.

I could do without Flash — or maybe install a Linux browser (an option that's certainly available) and just have Flash there, like I did with Opera in OpenBSD.

I was able to mount FAT drives with the -o large switch in mount_msdosfs, but I wasn't able to umount them. I suppose HAL could have played a role, and perhaps running GNOME without hald enabled is the way to go.

But as I said, I need to get this laptop back into a regular production role, and I'll probably return to Debian Lenny just to get things back to where they were. If you'll recall, my Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade debacle is what led me here in the first place.

One thing I will be doing in the very near future is figuring out how to image a hard drive with either Ghost 4 Linux in Parted Magic, or using the Clonezilla live CD. If I can image the entire drive and be assured that I could completely restore an installation after any upgrade, I'll feel a whole lot better about doing things like this.

What I really need are a couple/few more test machines on which to run things such as FreeBSD until I can figure out just how far my skill level can take me with them.

We could argue the whole Linux distro-vs.-BSD project thing all day, but I'll say two things:

• There's something to be said for a distribution (or project) that ships with a certain desktop environment as far as more things working than not out of the box.
• The PC-BSD project - a desktop-ready system built on FreeBSD - is the best way for anybody from the Linux world wishing to get the most out of FreeBSD. The importance of PC-BSD at this point cannot be overstated (it helps if you like KDE and PC-BSD's PBI packaging). I'd love to see a FreeBSD desktop project based on GNOME.

In conclusion: My skill level and the time I have available to mess around with stuff just isn't where it needs to be for me to run FreeBSD with GNOME. If I had a bigger hard drive, I'd dual-boot Linux and one or more BSDs (now I'm working with 20 GB, which isn't enough for a credible dual-boot). But for a single-boot system, I need to be back in an environment that is a bit more ready out of the box. And this week, that's Linux.

The FreeBSD - The Unknown Giant news page (which I refer to often) offers an announcement of the PC-BSD 8.0 live DVD that told me a few things I'm very happy about:

• It's a live DVD (didn't used to be but could've been so longer than I know), which means it's a great way to test the compatibility of a given machine with not just PC-BSD but also FreeBSD 8.0.
• The disc allows for the installation of both PC-BSD and FreeBSD

I like that. I tested PC-BSD back in the 1.x days, and I've thought the installer was one of the best for any open-source operating system. I wasn't in love with the PBI packaging system (and still am not), and I wasn't crazy about being forced to use KDE and not having the option of GNOME or Xfce during the install.

So I'd probably be better off with FreeBSD, adding the packages or ports I want after the fact.

Now I can test my systems' response to FreeBSD and install either the KDE-based PC-BSD or the roll-what-you-want FreeBSD from a single DVD image.

I'll be downloading and burning this one as soon as possible.