Blubuntu

Before my Beryl experiments, I briefly toyed with creating a new theme. I actually came up with something that I liked a lot. But upon returning to metacity I discovered that Edgy Eft has a theme that, while not perfect, is closer to what I want than what I came up with. A better starting place, if you will, though I'm still not very pleased with the title bars and will probably customize it at some point.

The theme name is Blubuntu. It is a pleasing theme with white and light grey backgrounds, accented with blue. In many ways, it's exactly what I was looking for: A modernization of the old Apple System 7 theme.

You can install it with synaptic.

Blubuntu Screenshot

blubuntu-screen.png

Theme desires

Here's what I'm looking for in a theme:

  • Largely off-white. I've seen some cool stuff done with dark backgrounds, but it just isn't for me. The cream you see behind this post is about as off-white as I'd get, and I think it's a bit strong. (In fact, now that I noticed this, I'll probably fix it before anyone even reads this post.)
  • Whiter controls. Most themes have buttons and controls the same color as the background. It all blends in together too much for my taste. The few themes that don't have buttons that are darker than the background. I want lighter.
  • Color as an accent. While I don't require the background color to be perfectly grey, I definitely prefer an off-white (as I mentioned above). But small amounts of color as an accent are nice.
  • Not distracting. Patterns, gradients and shadows are not for me.

Any ideas what qualifies? I realize I'm being picky here. I'd love to see a theme start from the Mac System 7 look, remove some of the patterned junk, and add a bit more color.

Edgy Eft improvements

A few things I noticed:

  • My ATI drivers are now working. I thought they were before, but the frame rate is so much better now that they must not have been. Also, my screen is now entirely on my monitor. I knew this was a driver issue, but I had no idea how to fix it before.
  • Firefox 2 is, of course, a huge improvement. I really missed spell checking. Firefox is not about to knock Safari off as my default browser on the Mac (at least, not until it does multi-platform extension/history/bookmark sharing via WebDAV), but it's nice to have something respectable on the Linux box.

Now, for the bad things:

  • I wish I'd kept better notes of the customizations I did to Dapper. I haven't got the Windows key functioning properly yet.
  • I still don't like the theme. It has curved corners now. Big deal. That isn't my problem with it; it's simply ugly. Yes, I know there are other themes available. To my eye, the Human theme is the best of a sorry lot. I am, perhaps oddly enough, not looking for something that looks exactly like Mac OS X or exactly like Windows XP. I am simply looking for something clean, with nice color accents, and that doesn't look like it has been beaten to death with an ugly stick and then left outside in the heat of summer for three weeks to rot. Oh, and left-aligned window titles without shadows would be nice, too.
  • #include "std_rants/menubar.h"

Kubuntu for the win

Tried to upgrade to Ubuntu machine to 6.10 last night by doing the source list change thing. I guess I messed up somewhere, because today my Linux machine shows a Kubuntu boot screen for a few seconds before crashing.

I'm relatively sure that someone with knowledge could fix this. But I'm going to chalk it up as another lame newbie mistake and reinstall. I'm more amused at the total chaos that's been caused than upset.

I did notice before trying to restart that Firefox has the real logo now. I didn't expect Ubuntu to go that way.

Things I miss on the Ubuntu desktop

Been a while since I last updated, so here are a few random things I miss on the Ubuntu/GNOME desktop:

  • Top menu bar. C'mon, the jury is not out on the best location for the menu bar anymore. It's been settled for all but the most die-hard users of operating systems that get it wrong (which is, unfortunately, most operating systems). At least offer a top menu bar as an option. I don't think this will ever happen.
  • Custom date formats. I hate dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, and so on. I want yyyy-mm-dd, which is actually the Canadian standard (even if it is infrequently used). I actually found several alleged solutions to this via google, but ultimately none of them actually worked.
  • Alt-tabbing while dragging. I can alt-tab between applications, and I can drag between applications, but I can't alt-tab while dragging. This is something both Mac OS X and Windows have solved.
  • Stale forks. For idealistic/political reasons, up-to-date versions of some software are quite hard to install under Linux. Firefox and Thunderbird are great example of this.
  • Expose. I know there's a hack to add it, but I'm looking for something more seamless. I imagine it'll be in a future version.

Ubuntu 6.06 revisted

With the help of a coworker, I've tried again and had much greater success.

The major problems I've had is lack of both general and specific documentation, rather than any technical problems. I haven't yet found a good overview guide.

Overview: For instance, you can use apt-get, aptitude or synaptic to install packages. The only one I knew about a few days ago was apt-get, which seems to be the weakest of the tree.

Specifics: As an example, package descriptions rarely describe how a package is invoked. For instance, nowhere when installing KDE did it explain how to invoke it. I found that on my own, but wouldn't the package description have been a logical place to put it?

I can and should have discovered this stuff on my own, but I can't help but wish it was better documented inside the OS. This isn't a flaw specific to Linux, although both Mac OS and Windows do a better job on it (Mac installs all its applications in a single, almost flat directory and Windows highlights new packages).

I've also noted some interesting flaws. Attempting to remove Evolution in synaptic listed ubuntu as a dependency. I did not proceed.

Still not ready

I decided to try to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Linux again this weekend. It looked like it might have been ready.

I'm sad to report it isn't. Not even remotely.

What worked well:

Ubuntu has a partition resize feature that allowed me to resize my Windows partition and create a ext3 and swap partition.

What didn't work:

For some reason, this tool kept refusing to recognize the swap partition. This sent me in a loop around the paritioning tool. It eventually let me out, but I still have no idea what I did differently the last time.

Upon rebooting to Windows XP later, the NTFS partition was corrupted. It seems to have recovered. Maybe that's expected.

Almost everything else about this experience could go into the "things that didn't work" category. I installed the ATI drivers, and they worked and worked well. But for no reason that I'm able to discern (there certainly aren't any error reports) I'm back at the OSS ones.

Compiz looked interesting in screenshots and movies I found online, but none of the instructions I found worked. Apparently this is a new breakage. I suspect this is what killed my ATI drivers.

I don't know how anyone can suffer under the delusion that this is ready for Joe Consumer - I've never struggled for two days to keep using the right video driver under Mac OS X or Windows.

Anyway. I guess I'll try again next year.