Dean Sas’s Weblog

First impressions of gnome-shell

// September 24th, 2009 // 46 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

GNOME Shell is the proposed interface for Gnome 3, it replaces the window manager, the panels at the top and bottom of the screen and everything that sits on them. It’s in the repositories for Karmic, install gnome-shell and then run gnome-shell –replace to give it a try. You should note that it’s still under heavy development and isn’t finished, or completely designed yet.

I’ve not used it much at all and it does feel quite weird so far but it makes a refreshing change and definitely looks nicer. As it’s still very much a work in progress I’m sure it’s only going to get better. That said there are some downsides.

One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity “overlay” and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn’t really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.

Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I’m not likely to forget the name of an application I’ve started.

As I’ve said gnome-shell replaces the current panels and everything on them (well except the notification area). This includes application launchers, it’s now quite a bit slower to open a terminal every time I need one. Hopefully this just needs some performance work to fix though. Previously I swung my mouse to the top of the screen and one mouse click. I now need to hit the windows key to bring the Activities Overlay up, wait a second and then type “term” and hit enter. It’s given me the impetus to make the apps I manually start via launchers on 90% of logins to auto-start.

The clock has regressed, it now no longer displays the date, or has it accessible at all and doesn’t have a calendar. I’m not sure how much of that is down to design or just a lack of time. It’s worth noting the storm in a teacupt when there was a proposal to change the Ubuntu configuration to not include the date.

There is also a sidebar which is turned off by default, apparently this is still very young and indeed it looks it. You can enable it by clicking on your name in the top right corner and checking Sidebar. By default it shows another, different, clock, some application launchers and recent documents. The application launchers as in the activity overlay seem to be hard-coded to open office and evolution, two apps I never use. I assume eventually they will be replaced with the most frequently used apps or be made configurable.

I’m quite conservative with my desktop usually, I like the default Ubuntu configuration and know it well. That said I’m enjoying using gnome-shell and intend to use it for a while at least. I’m looking forward to it evolving, including new concepts and growing more popular. The negatives I’ve noticed I think are mostly down to lack of time. I’m not sure if it’s going to be “ready” for the targeted date of next March and am not sure that it should be – there’s plenty more to prototype.

Added screen shots:

Configuring Enigmail

// November 15th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized

Enigmail is an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey to integrate the OpenPGP standard (specifically GPG) with the MUA.

After enigmail has been configured for a while and you then wish to go back and change a setting it can be quite confusing as to where to do it. The most obvious place to start is the OpenPGP->Preferences menu item, though Edit->Preferences would possibly have been better (I assume this is a technical limitation however) which brings up the following dialogue.

As displayed on the tab label and on the heading just below it, this is the ‘Basic’ set of preferences, so common or frequently changed preferences should be expected here perhaps. The first preference displayed is to do with overriding the default gnupg program to use, this option is only useful to those people who have multiple copies of gnupg installed and the preferred one isn’t found first in $PATH, which seems a little crazy for the first basic preference.

The second preference has slightly more of a right to exist but is also flawed. I’m not sure what ‘idle time’ referred to here means; time when the computer is inactive, or time when Thunderbird isn’t being used. I wonder whether or not it’s ever the case that I want the length of time my password is remembered to be the different to the length of time before the computer locks.

The checkbox displayed in this group is something you have to enable if you didn’t create a passphrase along with your key, I imagine that this is something that can be figured out automatically when enigmail tries to use the key. Originally I thought that this preference was a way to never remember the passphrase. Possibly the best thing to happen to this preference would be to remove the present widgets and replace them with 3 radio buttons like so:

+---------------------------------------------+
|        Remember passphrase:                 |
|                        ( ) Forever          |
|                        ( ) For this login   |
|                        (*) Never            |
|                                             |
+---------------------------------------------+

The third preference is a preference to configure the preferences window. this works by adding more tabs on either side of the ‘basic’ tab at the top of the page when the checkbox is enabled. Some of these settings seem quite unneccessary also, my favourite being ‘let me read any encrypted messages I send’, I’m unsure what the usecase for ‘let me write emails I can then never read again’ is.

In keeping with the seemingly arbitary way Thunderbird splits up its own preferences, there are also more preferences available under Edit->Account Settings (pictured below), which generally seem quite sane (though when doesn’t one want to sign an encrypted mail?). The most confusing thing about this window is that it has a button labelled ‘Advanced…’, which when clicked opens up the ‘Basic’ preferences window outlined above!

Owned

// September 1st, 2007 // 1 Comment » // General

Freelink

// August 29th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

I spent Monday afternoon flashing my Linkstation twice. I flashed it with Freelink – a firmware containing a basic Debian installation. This means that instead of having a Buffalo custom variation of Linux, I have Debian and all of the packages that that includes.

I promptly managed to mess up the network configuration file and so once I rebooted the Linkstation, it didn’t have an IP address and as it doesn’t have any other access method it was rendered inaccessible. Fixing this necessitated opening the Linkstation up, plugging the drive into another computer, removing all content from the drive and then putting it back together and reflashing it.

I intend on using the Linkstation for automated backups and for making my music accessible over the network using DAAP. I’m sure I’ll think of other things.

XML transformation

// August 26th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

It’s quite something when it’s easier to transform an XML file using a general purpose language (ruby) than the same thing using a language designed for that purpose (XSL). Impressively, Ruby has RSS libraries built into it’s standard library, see Ruby RSS for a brief example.

Feisty Feature of the Day

// April 12th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

Phil Bull has summed up his list of Feisty features blogged to date, he’s trying to write about a new Feisty feature every day from the beginning of March until release (one week to go!). It’s well worth a read, I’ve been running Feisty since November and there were a couple of things I found out about still.

My Recent Free Software Involvement

// March 17th, 2007 // No Comments » // General

I should really write in this thing more, spending time on my final year project, and free software things takes up most of my time though.

Recently I’ve been toying with a Gnome applet for the Twitter API – that notifies you when your friends twitter. I’m struggling to get it to work with the gnome-panel, it looks easy, I must be missing something though. I’m going to leave it now until May.

Earlier today I submitted a (pretty trivial) patch to the gimmie project that makes it look up the default web browser instead of hard coding Firefox as the “favourite application”.

I’ve also submitted fixes for a few small packaging bugs in Ubuntu – I think I understand the .deb package format and process now, once I get time I’d like to spend some time packaging some applications from scratch, just to make sure it’s clear.

I also did a little bit of hacking and code reviews on the bughelper project back in January, but haven’t had time to keep up with its rapidly changing code base.

Aside from that I’ve been doing my usual Ubuntu bug triage work, and also hanging out with the Ubuntu UK LoCo team