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Reducing wakups on laptops is very interesting suff, I've seen some post on how muche better the NO_HZ is making things, e.g. Ross went from 164w/s to 5w/s just waking up 5 times per second makes the CPU pretty cool...

There is an equivalent to advanced mode for GNOME. It's called GConf and it allows access to all sorts of bells and whistles that aren't visible in the main Control Center. All sorts of tricks are hidden in there, from lists of screensavers for GNOME screensaver to run to custom keybindings running scripts. The only extra I use for advanced window management is Devil's Pie which matches windows and performs window modifications based on a LISP configuration file. If that isn't hard core enough for you, you'll have to rewrite GConf in ML.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

For edge flipping and other "positional" controls at the corners of the screen, I assume you are talking about Brightside. It works alongside GNOME 2.14. What more did you need it to do?

For window matching, I assume you are referring to the curiously named Devil's Pie. I did laugh when you mentioned the "overly complex text configurations ... I gave up and just went back to Sawfish." because the configuration files for Devil's Pie are a lisp syntax and Sawfish is entirely configurable with, ummm, oh yes, LISP!

Maybe it's just me but I'd rather be given a full featured language to configure things with first and hope for a neat GUI later. The configs for Devil's Pie aren't really cryptic - here's an example that pins every GAIM window (makes it appear on every workspace) and hides the GAIM windows from the pager to avoid clutter.

(if (matches (application_name) "^[Gg]aim")
(begin pin
skip_pager
))

Stick that in a file - say ~/.devilspie/matchGaim.ds - and start devilspie. It's that hard :-)

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

There are also a lot of new things with Epiphany.

Read : http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?2006/03/15/100-why-you- should-try-epiphany-as-your-default-browser-with-g nome-214 (lot of screenshots) and http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2006-03-15/epiphan y-is-hype-get-over-it and http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/avahi-epip hany-2006-02-11-17-50

At the end of the presentation, Andreas Pleschek revealed that the laptop he used for the presentation was running a pre-release of their new platform, the Open Client. It is actually a Red Hat work station with IBM's new Workplace Client, which is built in Java on top of Eclipse. Because of Eclipse, it runs on both Linux and Windows, and they have been able to reuse the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows to run it natively on Linux via Eclipse. Internally in IBM, for years, they have had a need to run Lotus Notes on Linux, and now they can. And they will offer it to their customers. Workplace uses Lotus Notes for mail, calendar, etc. and Firefox as their browser. For an office suite, they use OpenOffice.org.

Not that, my dog.

First, while this is a personal preference, I use xfce4 for my desktop. It's fast, it's lightweight (relatively) and its infinitely configurable.

Then, download devilspie. This allows you to set up various programs like XMMS and gaim to not show up in your tasklist, pin windows to the screen regardless of desktop, etc, and makes ALT-TAB skip programs.

Then, download xbindkeys, and bind all those extraneous keys most new keyboards have to actual functions. If your system doesn't understand the keys (you're getting setkeycodes messages in /var/log/messages), then man setkeycodes, and map all those keys to something, and make xbindkeys use them to do various things. I have a Microsoft Multimedia keyboard here at work, and I've mapped every key to do something useful. Sleep enables my screensaver, log-off, calculator, messenger, web/home, mail all do what you'd expect, media runs xine, mute, play, stop, volume up and down, next song, and previous song all do what you'd think in xmms, my music runs xmms, my pictures runs gimp, and my documents runs xffm (xfce's file manager.)

Learn (or change so you know) the key combinations for switching desktops, swapping applications, etc.

Put SSH keys on all the servers you normally log into, and put ssh-askpass and ssh-agent into your xinitrc file.

Something I use that I find *INCREDIBLY* useful is:

xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"

Which makes X ignore the caps lock key, because in reality, I *never* use it, and the only time it's on, it's on by mistake, and learning that it's on by accident whilst running vim is *never* fun.

alias su to sudo su, so you only have to enter a password every once in a while.

Map one of your keys on your keyboard (if you don't have a multimedia keyboard, make it a ctrl-key combination of some sort) to xscreensaver-command -lock, and make it a habit to hit that button every time you walk away from your computer, so any logged in root shell is never a problem as far as physical security goes.

Also, if you do a lot of programming, and/or use vim a lot, I've found this function I threw together pretty useful in my .bashrc

if [ "x$DISPLAY" != "x" ];
then
function vim () { /usr/bin/vim.perl -g $@; }
fi

If I type in 'vim', it runs vim.perl (debian package) in X, since vim for x is generally more useful than console.

Also, I've set up my ssh to automatically forward X11 sessions (I only log into hosts I trust) so that if I run vim, and have my bash profile the same on the server I'm logging into, I get pretty graphical vim windows that make proper use of my :set mouse option.

That's all that immediately comes to mind, but it's also 9:25am on Monday.

Some corrections...

---

Sound Juicer ( http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juic er )

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MusicPD ( http://www.musicpd.org/ )

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Something went wrong after freenx.berlios.de...

http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) - Well made remote desktop solution, but no server for Windows atm.

21. Both PPTP and LT2P/Ipsec ones exist. Poptop ( http://www.poptop.org/ ) ...

I agree with the points Asa makes about migration and installing programs, and of these, I'll address the one where I know progress is being made.

Installing programs has been a pain for new Linux users for a long time. It's hard enough to adjust to the new paradigm of getting programs from a central repository, and laying an inadequate interface on top of that doesn't help much either. The main problem with Synaptic, the best apt frontend I've used, is that you have to wade through tons of packages for libraries and servers that few end users will ever touch. To fix this, Ross Burton put together a program that lets you install and remove programs through a tree that mirrors the Applications menu. Instead of installing some cryptic package, you're adding a menu entry. It may not be perfect, but it's vastly simpler. I'm currently working on expanding the program to let you install any application, among other things.

The other issue that people have with installing applications is that the repository might not have the latest, greatest version that the user wants. Ubuntu freezes a set of packages and stabilizes them, which is an approach that works for many users and keeps things bug free. For the next version, the backports project will be come an official part of Ubuntu, making it easier for users to choose if they want the latest packages or the most stable ones. Users won't have to try to install the Firefox binary that the MoFo provides since they'll be able to get it straight from the repositories, precluding any weird library incompatibility problems.

Things are getting better.

Check out Devilspie, it allows you to set the workspace and other settings (layer, tasklist/pager-visibility) per window. And it's a standalone-app, so it works with all WMs.

I'm not remotely excited about `true' transparency and drop shadows - features which are no use beyond looking pretty for me. However I can see that in order to get support, which is what an OSS project thrives on, the screenshot-happy users need to be pleased. So in that regard I think such developments are a trade-off.

What significant X developments would impact me? Well, has anyone tried adding a 3rd-party driver to X? I have to download the entire x source (apt-get source xfree86) and stick a diff from aiptektablet into the debian patch directory and build the whole freakin` thing (which, with .o's, clocks in over 300MB) in order to get my graphics tablet to work. Thats an enormous download and compile job when a mere fraction of that code and the result is needed. Streamlining and simplifying this process would allow more people to experiment with x hacks and make our lives easier.

I think hardware support for vector rendering will be a great benefit to how quickly window-manager and toolkit operations are performed - anyone profiled a GTK2 app recently, and seen the slice pango takes up?

Finally there is a lot of innovation going on outside of the x.org project which I think is equally as important as the framework - examples of next-generation window management such as ion and devil's pie show where I think things are moving for power-users.

There are already a lot of replies to this post saying "no definitely not, OSS developers are all elitest ignoramuses" because it's easy to sound insightful when criticising, but really what they're saying doesn't stack up. It might have been right 3 years ago but the improvements made since then have been staggering.

A lot of software has been rewritten or redesigned with usability being core. Example: grip was deemed a lost cause as far as UI went, so Sound Juicer was written instead. XMMS was deemed fundamentally flawed so Muine and RhythmBox were written. Gnome has adopted a pervasive HIG and while it may have a few rough edges still it's arguably more consistent than both Windows (hands up if you read the Windows HIG - thought not) and even Apples (brushed metal or aqua - what mood is Steven in today?).

Today, if you want, you can get software that's had well thought through usability. That doesn't mean everybody uses it, but it's certainly available to those who want it.

Now, there are some big remaining usability issues in free software but these tend to be structural/architectural. For instance Linux software installation is frequently very difficult and it's not easy to solve without a great deal of engineering.

On Windows the GIMP user interface isn't anywhere near as good as on Linux, despite the GIMP 2 itself making great strides over the 1.2 release in absolute terms, the different (arguably worse) Windows WM model and UI paradigms aren't accounted for and there aren't enough Win32 Gimp developers to give Gimp/Win32 an excellently integrated UI. Or at least, not rapidly.

This is more a side-effect of the Gimp being most popular on Linux and the core developers all using Linux though, rather than any fundamental insight into the nature of open source. I've seen some pretty crap ports to Windows UI from commercial companies as well - for instance, the laughable QuickTime 4 which not only made zero effort to integrate with the host operating systems UI but also committed quite a few usability sins like the thumbwheel.

Watch how people use this sort of MDI. 95% of the time they just maximize the main window and manage the internal windows as if they were on the top level. If that's all you are going to do, you might as well drop MDI in favor of multiple top-level windows. All you get from it is maybe a menu bar, status bar, and a solid gray background.

Now, I suppose we could come up with some crazy X extension to allow window managers to manage internal frames, but it just doesn't seem worth the effort.

For grouping, I just confine certain applications to certain workspaces. I use devilspie to do this automatically. I configured it to put mozilla on desktop #4, gaim and xmms on #7, and evolution on #8. With the rest of the workspaces, I just manually confine the applications (because I use them for different things depending on what I am doing).

One click, and your ripped!. Its one of the tools I just can't live without. It worked on all my copy protected CD's.