Yesterday I spent some time playing with some alternative window managers. After spending hours and hours tinkering with the internals of GNOME in preparation for my presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference I needed a change of scenery. I experimented with evilwm and openbox primarily. They were both very interesting, and I realized there are so many more that I haven’t even considered yet. What do you use?
I keep hearing about other window managers like Awesome, xmonad, etc, etc. I’m curious about trying them out but I’m not sure I’d know where to start. If you use any of these (ie; anything other than the ‘standard’ GNOME or KDE environments) please drop a comment regarding why.
To give you an idea about my computing habits, I generally only really need the following:
- Terminal (gnome-terminal preferred, xterm is fine)
- Browser (chromium or something else lightweight)
- Email (evolution or mutt generally)
- Keyboard control (if I could spend a day without touching the mouse, that’d be awesome)
I appreciate the feedback. Hopefully I’ll be able to generate some posts based on using some of these other window managers soon.
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For those of you that enjoy the bleeding edge and want to help test the next release of Ubuntu, the second Alpha release of 9.10 is now available. You should be warned that this release is not meant for the faint of heart or production machines. It will very likely break before it is done, leaving you with all kinds of interesting problems. On the other hand though, a little bleeding edge never killed anyone (plus, you learn a lot when things break).
Some of the upcoming features in Ubuntu 9.10 are:
- GNOME 2.27.1
- Linux Kernel 2.6.30
- New Intel Video Architecture (testing)
- New default compiler (GCC-4.4 vs GCC-4.3)
- EXT4 filesystem by default (I’m excited about this one!)
- Grub2 by default
If you’d like to help test this release you can find more information regarding known issues, download locations and how to report bugs here. Let the testing begin!
Many of you know that I’ve been running and testing Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” since early in the alpha stage. There have been no show stoppers and its been fun to see the development continue to happen, and be able to contribute to that by submitting bugs. Again, I have not seen any major bugs, just little oddities here and there. If you can please consider upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 beta (released 9-27-07) and help us finish what is left of the bugs.
I have heard from a few people that had a few odd issues upgrading. One “fix” that I used worked in my situation and may work for others so I thought I would share it.
If you get an error about having upgrades available but when you try to retrieve them they are not accessible my guess (again, this may not be completely accurate) is that repository data between the many mirrors is not synced properly with the actual repository. I have found changing your repository to a different mirror often helps clear up this issue.
You can find a *very* long list of available mirrors in System > Admin > Software Sources : “Download From” drop-down, select “other”. At this point you can select one from the list or “Select Best Server”.
In the long run I would suggest more people select the best server for their area. In any event, try a new repository and see if that helps refresh your list and get the updates that should be available. I hope this helps.
I’ve run into a couple of weird issues this week and I thought I would bounce it off the group here. If you’ve got any suggestions or fixes for these issues I sure would appreciate it.
- I run a proxy over ssh and squid for privacy-sake (and so IT at my office minds their own business!) I use the command “ssh -C -L 8080:localhost:3128 my.remote.squid.proxy”. This works great, and I’m planning a tutorial for a more detailed outline, but the odd thing is when I disconnect and exit the terminal it doesn’t close. The terminal (both gnome-terminal & konsole) just sit there and I have to kill it by clicking the X. If I simply connect via ssh without the port binding everything closes as normal. Is this based on one of my arguments? Anyone else seen this?
- I’ve been trying to remove the fade-out effect (such as when prompted for a password, logging out, etc) but keep the “grab” feature where the box demands focus. I’ve been able to remove the fade, but this also removes the focus grabbing which is a big security problem. Does anyone know a way to remove the fade effect but keep the focus grabbing for the dialog box? Previous suggestions found here on the ubuntuforums.
I know the both of these are a little off the wall but I appreciate any feedback. The first is a little annoyance for me while the second has been a long-time concern for a friend of mine. I hope we’ll be able to solve it for him. Thanks!