Nitpicking on XFCE

As you might have noticed together with switching to Rawhide I've also switched to XFCE recently. Now that I'm quite used to it and have set it up in a way that it looks almost like my previous gnome set up, there are still some things that I don't like (or I am just dumb enough to don't know how to get rid of them :D).

So let's start with an obligatory screen-shot of my current desktop.
And now to actual complaints ;-) Beginning with the things that are on the screen-shot. I cannot drag-n-drop window buttons between themselves. I used this a lot in gnome to resort the windows for the ordering more functional than (like keeping the mail client always on the furthest left), I does not seem to be able to do that with xfce. Next comes the clock applet. I've found three none of which is perfect (one does not show date, another one does not have transparent backgrounds) with the one displayed being best. But as you see it's a bit cramped. IMHO there should be some space between the time and date, or an option to display it along side, not one above the other…

So, that was the top panel, now for desktop. For some reason right-clicking on the desktop peaks the cpu load and takes a while before menu appears (only for the first try, subsequent tries are reasonably fast). But the main issue are the filled rounded rectangles behind icon labels and way too big grid – I don't want only the wallpaper behind the icon labels and I want the icons to be closer together (while still this big). Another problem is when clicking on an icon it always opens thunar instead of the default file manager.

Now for the things in bottom panel. As I recall the workspace switcher behaves a little bit odd when setting up – when you switch number of rows of workspaces it takes effect only after re-logging which is a bit confusing (one is led to believe that it does not works only to be confronted with a working 2-row set-up after next log in).

Next is thunar. It seems to be a nice file manager but it lacks two killing features that were added in recent gnome releases to nautilus – tabs and two-panel browsing. While tabs are just more efficient substitutions for multiple windows, two-panel browsing makes moving and/or copying files around really pleasant. I hope the devs have it on their to-do list because, as I wrote before, using nautilus in xfce is kind of suboptimal.

And probably my final complaint is about setting up dual head. At home I have plasma TV which I can connect to via VGA cable. The problem is that while it supports 1368x768 60Hz resolution via this connection, it reports only 1024x768 60Hz, so I have to add that mode manually via xrandr. So far this is OK, this way it worked before in gnome as well. However even when I add that mode, the xfce config utility stubbornly refuses to set it up. Sigh. And to top it, there does not seem to be any way, in gui, to set the two monitors (integrated display and TV in this case) to be say next to each other. They're always over themselves and again I have to use xrandr directly to set the layout correctly.

And so that's probably all. And despite these little issues, I think XFCE is a really nice desktop environment almost ready to harbour all escapees from Gnome 3 in Fedora 15 ;-) In short, fix these above mentioned issues and it would probably be fully ready ;-)

F15 Alpha Wallpaper — Package Review Needed

So, it's the time of year again, alpha freeze approaches and first version of wallpaper is being packaged and thus I need someone to do a quick review. I could do a swap review if desired.

And here's an obligatory screenshot (yes, it is rawhide and no, it is not gnome, it is xfce).


Comments on the wallpaper are welcome (as well as pointers on how to make it appear in xfce background chooser other than adding manually).

EDIT: Thanks to Tim Lauridsen the package is now reviewed :-)

Back to the Future – On Rawhide Again

So, I decided to give Rawhide a go and installed it as my second system (and thus replacing F12, because I skipped F13). So, here are some thoughts.

Given my position on gnome-shell (I really don't like it) I decided to give a go to something lightweight, so I downloaded lxde nightly build. Aah, it was a disaster. Whatever display manager was supposed to start was crashing, so I had to log in to tty and run startx manually. That worked, luckily. I didn't like the booted desktop environment one bit, but lots of other bits so I installed it to hard-drive. Of course, it haven't fixed the booting issue.

So I tried to set it up as I'd like, but eventually gave up. Few weeks after that, I downloaded Desktop live and booted. My impression was: "have my PC turned to next-gen TV, err home multimedia center?" Still I decided to install it (to replace the lxde try), but no luck – due to a bug in anaconda, it thinks it's not live image…

So I've done it the harder way. Reboot to lxde, log-in, update, group-install gnome, install system-switch-displaymanager-gnome and set display manager to gdm. Nice, after that I finally got working graphical log-in, although during boot error message appears, that something cannot find root, but apparently it works. Let me add a little side comment here: the boot sequence is totally useless. Even if I escape from the graphical plymouth progress indicator, not boot messages appear. Whatsoever. How the hell am I supposed to tell that the booting actually is still in progress and not hogged up on some service?

But back to the main theme. So I logged in to gnome-shell (to my disappointment same looking as on desktop nightly) and tried it to use for a while. And I have to say, what was bad is even worse and the most important things I wanted (useful and quick way to switch between windows in one concrete task) are still not there. Desktop/task visualisation got small with no windows indicators on it whatsoever, so how the hell am I supposed to tell to which task do I want to switch? If I had to summarize my impression of gnome shell, it would be probably disappointment with trying to make PC from work tool into a tool for consuming, i.e. gnome shell would be awesome if it was a user interface to next-gen home media center or tv, but it's irritating when you actually want to work using it.

Next, not succeeding in finding a way to switch back to the old-school gnome, I group-installed xfce. I'm pretty impressed how fast and responsive these light-weight things are. On the flip side I had to get rid of gmixer to have only one sound-controlling applet in system try (why the hell do they still ship gmixer when pulseaudio mixer is now superior to it in more than one way?). Next I had a little trouble with configuring the panels – no spacing thingie, desktops do not show in two rows until next log in, there's no way to make them transparent… Texts bellow icons on desktop have some weird solid color background and there seems to be no way to turn it off, I cannot resort window buttons in "Window Buttons" panel applet, there seems to be no way to turn on compositing… But overall xfce seems to be usable.

I even switched, for the time being, to sylpheed mail client, which was installed by default on lxde spin. Even though its icons are rather ancient, the user interface is clean and easy to use and it seems much faster than evolution. But there still seem to be applications from gnome that I need like empathy, nautilus (yes I got addicted to two panel mode pretty hard), rhythmbox.

So in short, unless gnome-shell is postponed again, so long and thanks for all the fish and count me as new xfce user :-D

Oh, and btw. despite being still pre-alpha, rawhide is actually working pretty well (apart from annoying occasional graphic errors, new black&white gnome try icons [see the picture bellow] and unfinished gtk3 theme)!



EDIT: Actually I just found that compositing is possible with xfce so I have the bottom panel transparent again and windows have shadows :-)

EDIT 2: And now I have found how to rid myself of the weird looking frame around system try and how to add expansible space into panel so I have the bottom panel spanning whole screen again. Nice, I'm starting to like xfce more and more.

Nothing's Perfect — Funny SPAM Detection

I've been itching to share this experience with everyone for a while now, but never got to actually write it. You know, I'm using gmail and I am receiving hundreds of emails (from mailing lists, bugzillas, real people etc.) each day (and for that reason I have a lot of filters to keep them sorted). And a tiny amount of these are SPAM. Sometimes google fails to detect obviously SPAM as such and I can understand that, however it is almost ironic how some perfectly sane and legitimate mails end up in SPAM folder. Ever since I noticed a mail from my thesis' advisor in SPAM folder I check every mail there. And among those that almost 100% end up there while they shouldn't are mails to webkit-dev mailing list from people with @google.com mail address. Funny, isn't it?

New Books to Read

I wouldn't usually write in my blog about new books I bought, but today I bought two books that I think look a bit weird together :-D First was an award winning novel Kafka on the Shore by Murakami Haruki, another one was one of your usual second volume of shōnen (for boys) harem (with lots of girls centered around male protagonist) manga Negima!. So I took that as an opportunity to test out the so-called "Auction" mode of my new compact camera (yeah, I don't have the money to buy something really good like Nicu has ;-)) Casio EX-H5 (black version). Here's the photo:

And as a bonus a few photos taken from where I live (as you can notice, the image quality isn't very good, but I couldn't expect more for the prize >_<):