Recently in Linux Category
So you've recently upgraded Gnome and discovered that they have decided to
replace xscreensaver with gnome-screensaver and you don't like it. At this
point it time it seems most likely that you've just upgraded to Fedora 7 and
seen the change. There are a few guides that talk about adding xscreensaver's
screensavers to gnome-screensaver. This is not another one of those.
Unlike the apparent masses, I don't think gnome-screensaver is more elegant
than xscreensaver. Quite the reverse, actually. I liked xscreensaver and its
functionality, and I decided to switch back to it entirely. It wasn't really
difficult, there were just a few steps involved. I did this with Fedora 7 and
Gnome 2.18. It's all GUI, so don't be intimidated. You, too, can have your old
screensaver engine back.
First I changed my Gnome session to kill gnome-screensaver and start
xscreensaver because I had difficulty finding a way to permanently disable
xscreensaver. Do do this I went to the System menu, drilled down into the
Preferences sub-menu, drilled into the Personal sub-menu, and selected
Sessions. Under the Startup Programs tab, click the New button. Name this
command killall gnome-screensaver and set the command to /usr/bin/killall
gnome-screensaver, then click OK. Now click New again. Make this program's
name Start xscreensaver and make the command /usr/bin/xscreensaver -nosplash.
The next time you log into gnome you will kill all gnome-screensaver processes
and start xscreensaver. Xscreensaver cannot run twice, so don't worry about
logging in multiple times prior to rebooting.
Second, I changed the Screensaver menu item to launch my xscreensaver
preferences instead of gnome-screensaver's. Go to the System menu,
Preferences, Look and Feel, and Main Menu. In the tree on the left, drill into
System, Preferences, and click on Look and Feel. In the right hand pane,
double-click Screensaver. In the Launcher Properties window change the command
to /usr/bin/xscreensaver-demo, then click Close and Close again. Now you'll
see xscreensaver's preferences when you choose Screensaver from your
preferences menu.
Finally, I added a launcher to my panel for locking my screen. The launcher
that comes with Gnome triggers gnome-screensaver, not xscreensaver, so I
created this instead as I like locking my screen when I'm not looking at it.
Right-click your panel of choice and click Add to Panel. Select Custom
Application Launcher and click Add. The launcher's type is Application. Its
name is Lock Screen. Its command is /usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -lock. For a
comment I put Lock the screen. Click the button that says No Icon and choose
your favorite icon. I liked
/usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/actions/gnome-lockscreen.svg. Click OK and
Close. You can, of course, move that launcher wherever you need.
The fun part is it actually took longer to write this than it did to do it. I
hope someone somewhere found this helpful, but most of my readers would have
already known and the rest wouldn't care.
Score one for KDE! I'm a Gnome user, myself, but when I hear things like this I consider a switch. KDE developer Zack Rusin posts that he's got most of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. This brings to mind a question - will we be looking at a Dashboard-esque interface in KDE 4 or will we see something more akin to NeXT's dock? Dave Caolo of tuaw ponders the widgets that depend on Applescripts. My immediate guess is that those won't function, but that there aren't a lot of them. More important to me is the ability to see a standardized widget format which can be imported into things like the Yahoo! Widget Engine for Windows and OS X, KDE, and Dashboard. Standardization would be great.
[Via TUAW]
This is pretty cool. Rendezvous is a technology implemented by Apple in iChat. It basically allows for things like real-time chat (instant messaging) without having to connect to an actual server / service. It works over a LAN. Seems that Apple will be releasing this for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. That'll make intraoffice communications a little more interesting.
This article provides some excellent advice to linux software vendors, citing examples of the issues caused by the all-too-common carelessness of the companies. I have to highlight this and point out that they're right on all counts.
I also want to say that I think Best Practical, makers of RT, very much have the right idea when they provide an open source product, that works and can be used out of the box by any competent sysadmin. But they provide a level of service above and beyond. Their technical support and consulting costs some money -- and is worth every penny -- and as consultants they will happily set up your RT system as customized as you could ever desire.
This article claims that HP has "supposedly" been selling Linux Mandrake on the desktop for a while now. I'm not sure how true this is, but I do remember them coming out with a distribution heavily based on Mandrake. Translation of that is probably that they used Mandrake with an HP icon.
But that aside this article let's one thing be known that I hadn't seen yet. It seems that Mandrake submitted their plan to get out of the French version of chapter 11 bankruptcy last week. That's great news for the new Linux user.