Unity and which Linux to choose today

Ubuntu adorers may be shocked by the article at lxer that criticizes the dumbed-down new interface in Natty, Unity. I have used Ubuntu for a long time, for its ease of use and flexible GNOME desktop, that I do customize a lot from its default appearance and function. My current choice is Linux Mint Debian Edition, because of its great application menu. This menu allows you to search for applications to run or install, and also browse through categories as in the traditional menu. I add dockbarx for a good application launcher / window list, similar to that of Windows 7 and less toy-ish than that of Unity. I put that on the left side of the desktop. Finally, I use AWN as a notification area. These are both available from the webupd8 ppa. The finished desktop looks something like the attached picture:

We have a more capable application launcher and window list on the left, and a notification area in the top right. We do not have a Mac OS X - like global menu. I dislike that because I have not been able to use it together with mouse focus (sloppy focus / focus follows mouse). It is just incompatible with focusing everything the mouse traverses, which is useful to my workflow.

Dessy on SourceForge

My research project Dessy (Desktop Search and Synchronization) is officially on sourceforge. The project is Free (as in beer and freedom) Open Source Software (FOSS). You can download and use it on Windows, Linux, Mac (not tested), BSD, Nokia N900, and MIDP phones. The software lets you search synchronize individual files and whole filesystems.
Software download sites have also picked up on Dessy: softsea on Dessy r65 and softpedia on Dessy r67 (windows variant), softpedia on Dessy r67 (Mac variant). I hope it works on the Mac, because I have not tested it there.

DiscGolfer for N900, Windows, and MIDP

I have published a piece of software for recording (Disc) Golf scores while on the track. The software is Free (as in beer and freedom) Open-Source Software (FOSS). You can add/remove players and holes, and use numbers 1 to numberOfPlayers and numberOfPlayers+1 to 2 * numberOfPlayers to add/remove throws of players. On the Nokia N900, qwerty... and asd... can be used similarly, to support up to 10 players. On MIDP phones, numbers 1-9, 0 are used and 5 maximum players are supported. Games can be saved and loaded, though on MIDP there is currently no way to export games from the device.

Funny stuff from Kansas City

Funny stuff from Kansas City. Check it out on Picasa Web:

Things to check out in (Ubuntu) Linux

The default setup of Ubuntu is still not on par with Windows or Mac OS X:

• An icon-based application switcher with previews is missing.
• The option for a Mac OS X - style global menu bar is coming in the next Ubuntu release.
• The Ubuntu Menu is clearly separated into Applications, Places, and System, but requires several clicks to get you where you want to go, and does not support search.
• The File manager does not support quick preview of most file types.

In this post, I offer solutions for these four issues. I believe each is worth trying for anyone using Ubuntu Linux. Most are possible to try under other distributions as well, though you may need to compile things from source or search for alternate binary releases to the ones I present here.

Nokia N900 and disk space

The disk space woes on the Nokia N900 seem to be partially solved by the PR 1.2 release. /usr/games, /usr/share/pixmaps, /usr/share/themes, and a bunch of other things are symlinked to /opt, which by default has the 2GB of space. Also, some games in extras and extras-devel allow you to place game data under MyDocs. An example is Albion.

Nokia N900 out of space? Repartition it, here's how

This post is an up-to-date version of the repartitioning guide from sumodou.org.