On Friday the new versions of Ubuntu and their related projects came out. So on Saturday Hubby and I went to task updating to Edgy Eft, but instead of installing Kubuntu we decided this time to go for Ubuntu. The main difference as far as I’m concerned is that Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop environment and Kubuntu uses K. I’d gotten quite used to K but the obvious benefit of having Gnome is getting XGL to work! Well, some of the things needed to run XGL are incompatible with the most up-to-date drivers so we’ll just have to wait until they’re updated. 🙁 Now my task is to find my way around Gnome.
It took me a good while to figure out themes; you can apply different window borders, application themes and icons and then save them together as one theme. I couldn’t find one complete them that I was satisfied with, actually I couldn’t find any application themes that I was satisfied with, the windows and icons weren’t too hard. Gnome Art has some sweet downloads; the only problem I had with the many application themes is that, you’ll notice, I have transparent panels at the top and bottom of my screen, many of the themes were fine in every respect except not respecting that transparency so that the menus in the top left were still solid gray – ugly! So I ended up editing the Crux theme, which comes already installed (with borders, app themes and icons), to be blue instead of purple. Of course then I had to use different icons because it’s a lot more time consuming to change the colour of those.
Anyway, in theory I could make (or hack) a whole new theme… you know, if I wanted to spend the time on it. I’m happy to let others do it for now 🙂
Ubuntu also came with Firefox v2.0, which is out for those of you that haven’t yet heard. So far I’ve noticed a couple of changes… At the right of the tab bar there’s a “list tabs” button, it could come in handy and for those that were using an extension to do something like that, you don’t need to anymore. It also has the option to start Firefox where you left off, with the same tabs open, that’s mainly what I was using Session Saver for, so I don’t need that now – yes it works in the event of a crash as well (I don’t recommend trying to change the themes while Firefox is open, it will crash every time). The extensions and themes are nicely condensed into one little window titled “Add-ons”, with a tab for Themes, one for Extensions and one for Languages. Not all your favourite themes and extensions have been ported to v2.0 but a good number have been. I was a bit sad when my iFox theme didn’t work after the upgrade but then I went back and they were there so now I have them back!
Removed from the preferences seems to be automatically opening bookmarks in a new tab. I’m not sure if this was a feature of Tab Mix Plus (which hasn’t been ported yet) or not. A number of times I’ve lost half of this post because I kept opening other sites into this tab. It’s okay, I just have to get used to middle clicking for that too.
Ooh, the other thing that Firefox now has is in-line spell-checking for forms. It’s pretty groovy, writing this post I don’t need my spell checker plugin anymore and you’ll now have spell-checking in comments too! It doesn’t have “Firefox” in the dictionary though!
I’m sure there’s lots more new features, including automatic phishing site detection, I’ll find more new features in time I’m sure.
I have found Gnome less easy to get around in than KDE, the menu and applications options seem to be far inferior in Gnome. I still haven’t figured out how to assign keyboard shortcuts to applications. There is a keyboard shortcut list but it doesn’t have applications in it. I also managed to break my n and p keys in the process of assigning shortcuts; and no, I’m not so stupid as to use them by themselves or with shift. After changing the shortcuts a restart of Gnome seemed to fix the problem.
Ubuntu also supposedly comes with hibernation capabilities. It has hibernate as a shut down/log off option but it didn’t seem to work at all last night. It looked more like a lock screen or log off command, kept going to a login command.
The new version of Gaim (intstant messaging) is much better! It actually tells you want your status is! I was so confused about that before.
I want to move the desktop folders and mounts to somewhere less intrusive on the desktop. I’d also love a program like Quicksilver (on Mac OSX) for Ubuntu. Has anyone used Gnome Launch Box?
Hmm new toys, lots of fun, and frustration, they’re also very time consuming. Daylight savings stated today! I didn’t even know it was happening and then WHAM! I lost an hour.
