Yenya's World

The GDM Fiasco

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:47:00 +0100

A short trip to the history: for GNOME 2.22 (two years ago, in the Fedora 9 timeframe) someone decided that it would be nice to completely rewrite the GNOME display manager. So far so good, but they have decided to include this partially rewritten piece of crap without many important features (a display manager without XDMCP, WTF?) to the official GNOME and thus Fedora releases.

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Is Ekiga Doomed?

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:47:00 +0100

I am more-or-less happy user of ekiga. However, with the latest GNOME release (or two), I am not sure about its future. The new GNOME contains a new instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, Empathy.

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Firefox File Input

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:04:00 +0100

The daily user-interface annoyance award herby goes to the Firefox (or rather XULRunner, which means this is present also in Galeon). The problem is in forms in the <input type="file"> fields. It looks like this:

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Browsers: Back to Square One

Wed, 28 May 2008 18:36:00 +0100

On Oct 15, 2005 i wrote about Galeon development slowing down, and I speculated that I would have needed to choose a new browser. With recent problems of Galeon in Fedora 9, I have decided to look at the current state of browsers again.

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Ekiga, PulseAudio, and D-Bus

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:34:00 +0100

It seems that more and more applications start using D-Bus for communication, so it is time to get ones feet wet with the D-Bus programming. Fedora 8 has PulseAudio enabled by default, which conflicts with Ekiga because of this ALSA bug (see also the related PulseAudio issue).

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XRandR

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:46:00 +0100

I have installed Fedora 8 on my workstation. Everything works as expected, except the multihead support. I am getting the "Requested Entity already in use!" error message. The problem is that my xorg.conf uses two separate screens, instead of one screen merged by XRandR extension (which is apparently the preferred way of doing dual-head now).

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Command of the Day

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 10:16:00 +0100

I will probably show my own level of ignorance here, but let me show you an useful utility which can improve the integration of the command line and desktop:

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Gnome Terminal

Wed, 16 May 2007 22:43:00 +0100

A command of the day is the following one:

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Device Event Handler

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:55:00 +0100

An useless but nice hack of the day: I have explored the udev rules a bit further - with udev, it is possible even to run a script when the device is created. I wrote two simple scripts - one at home, where it loads images from my camera after I plug the camera in, and stores them into my image repository. The other at work - around 6:30pm, I download the main daily news from the Czech radio station Radiožurnál, encode it to OGG/Vorbis, and when my Palm is plugged in, the script started by udev copies the audio file to the Palm. The rule itself is pretty simple:

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3D Desktop

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 18:46:00 +0100

The Linux weekend was interesting even for me, altough the intended audience was people who are not familiar with Linux (I think this was an organizational mistake). One of the most interesting presentations was about the window manager named Beryl. At first I thought it was an interesting but useless eye-candy, but after discovering that there are Beryl packages in Fedora Extras, I have decided to give Beryl a try.

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Bluetooth File Transfer

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:48:00 +0100

Today I have spent some time trying to upload an image to Pavlína's phone - SonyEricsson T68i. I have succeeded, but it was not straightforward:

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Usability tests

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 11:34:00 +0100

Apparently Novell did usability tests of their GNOME desktop (I think I have already read about it in the Linux Journal or somewhere). Today I have managed to browse their results: interesting work, I must say. However, there was one thing that surprised me, and I wondered whether the researchers did have any basic knowledge of how UNIX works at all:

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Japanese input methods

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:16:00 +0100

Yesterday I did some experiments with writing Japanese in Linux/GNOME. It turned out it was pretty straightforward and Fedora is well prepared for writing Japanese.

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Gnome User Share

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 20:38:00 +0100

In order to explore Avahi a bit further I have decided to find out how the file sharing with Avahi works. I was surprised how simple, elegant, and UNIXish it is:

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Running tasks' icons

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 17:08:00 +0100

Yet another article from my "Desktop Rants" series. In the Good Old Days(tm) when there were no "desktop environments" per se, just a window manager with a bunch of apps, the window manager used on-desktop "icons" for minimized applications. Nowadays, probably inspired by MacOS, the icons on the desktop are used for files, directories, and application shortcuts instead. Minimized (or all?) applications were moved to a window list applet on the panel.

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