For all those Ubuntu users who didn’t think one Ubuntu Human Theme was enough there are three variations to choose from in Ubuntu 8.04: Human, Human-Clearlooks, and Human-Murrine.
The differences between them are subtle - sight variations in the hues as well as the variations between the 3 GTK2 enginces (Ubuntulooks, Clearlooks and Murrine respectively).
Try ‘em all three out, and decide which “human” is right for you…I prefer Human-Clearlooks myself!
Due to a jerk amusing himself by posting nonsensical and offensive comments on my blog, I am now going to approve all comments before they are posted.
Please comment away, but expect a delay before it appears.
I’m not sure if “uninvent” is really a word, since it generally wouldn’t be possible to uninvent something that had already been created. I’m seriously having a love hate relationship with cell phones lately though.
Just now I had to run down to the Grocery Store because I bought a nice Sirloin Roast yesterday and I forgot to get some Lipton Onion Soup mix, and we all know it’s nearly a sin to make a beef roast without any Lipton Onion Soup Mix. As I was headed to the store, I passed three little girls, maybe 11 or 12 on bicycles and all three were riding with one hand and jabbering away on their cellphones. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this - it’s getting all too common for my taste. I see little kids and pre-teens all the time in stores, at the mall or just outside (when they should be running and getting exercise) talking away.
Are we as a society getting to a point to where even children can’t “unplug”?
There is another thing I’d like to uninvent if I could and that’s Bluetooth - or at least those little bluetooth things people wear in their ears. They have to be the single biggest personal pet peeve I have. There is a guy at work who works in our call-center taking support calls. His job is to talk on the phone for 8 hours a day, yet every time I see him, either going in, on break, on lunch or leaving for the day he is talking away to some invisible person. If I ever run into him, I’m scared to speak because I don’t know if he’s talking to me or some random person inside his ear (or perhaps his head 
) He actually did speak directly to me one day and I felt like a jerk because I didn’t answer him right away - but I was so used to him talking to someone on the phone, I honestly didn’t realize he was directly addressing me.
I have another friend, probably one of my best friends ever who will instantly stop a conversation with me (face to face) to answer his phone. HELLO! I’m right here! We are directly interacting - that is why you have voice mail - if it can’t wait they will vibrate your hip off until you can’t stand it any more, THEN you can answer it, but only then! What I would give to be able to say that out loud!
Do we need cellphones to survive? No!
Do cellphones make our lives easier? I don’t think so - here’s why.
I think as a society we have lost the ability to unplug. We seem to never relax anymore. I love to fish, and even though I’m only 28 years old I remember days not too very long ago when I would easily go spend a day on the lake with no cell phone, no thought of email or computers - just thoughts of landing the big one. Now, I feel sometimes like if I were in a situation where nobody could get in contact with me, I would feel uncomfortable. It seems our whole lives are interconnected, and everything is on show. Stuff like Twitter seems to make that even stronger - I see people twitting all over the place, and sometimes it’s useless stuff. I don’t care what song you are listening too right now - enjoy your music, and I’ll enjoy mine.
I know people at work who answer email as quickly as they answer instant messages. Is that productive or counterproductive? I think it’s the latter - if you are doing your job, you don’t have time to answer 5 emails a minute.
I’m a techy kinda guy but I think some parts of technology are sucking the very life out of what makes us individual, intelligent people. I think every once and a while we should all just “unplug” from everything and get back to what life is really all about. Stop worrying so much and just relax. It’ll be OK. I promise. Break out an encyclopedia (the kind with pages in it) if you need to learn something once and a while. Every once and a while, stop by the Library (you know that big building downtown with all the books in it), and do some research. I forbid you to use a computer while you are there - pull out some microfiche and dig through some old periodicals and newspapers to find some information. Also, while you are at it - try typing something more than a few sentences long, something important that you want to make a good impression on who reads it, and do it all without spelling and grammar checking. Use your noggin - it’s what God gave it to you for.
Sorry for being cynical - I guess I’m just having an Andy Rooney moment
One of the happiest “geek-days” I remember was the day Gmail announced IMAP access for Gmail - Finally, I could interact directly with GMail from an e-mail client and not let my web-interface got to heck from neglect while using POP3.
Also, IMAP allowed me to use Alpine as my mail client - I’ve liked Pine since I first used it in college (yes we had webmail access, but I prefered to telnet into the system and use pine). Pine is fast, simple, I can move through mail quickly and it protects me from unsightly HTML email (I firmly believe all email should be plain text).
However, for some reason over the last few weeks I’ve been having a heck of a time with my GMail/IMAP combination - I tend to leave Alpine open in a terminal, and my system beep (over my PC speaker) alerts me when there is new mail, however recently Alpine was timing out, and giving a mailbox closed error. Usually I’ve been able to restart Alpine and be back in business, however lately, It’s timed out, wouldn’t let me log in, and on a couple of occasions would report that IMAP wasn’t enabled for my account.
I thought maybe that it was Alpine and not Gmail’s IMAP interface, but I’ve been able to reproduce the errors with Evolution and Thunderbird, so I’ve resorted to what I thought I would never do - I’m using GMails web-based interface. You know what though? It isn’t that bad. I’ve gone through and set up Labels and Filters, and it’s actually quite efficient.
Now if Gmail would only implement the ability to change to a bottom reply by default. I’m sure many people are used to top-reply, however if you spend any time in a mailing list you will quickly be scolded if you top-post.
The other day I installed compizconfig-settings-manager and started playing around with some of the advanced settings in compiz, and everything was working OK, I’d just had enough of all the “Extras” and I wanted to go back to Ubuntu’s “Normal” effects as selectable in Appearance Preferences, but apparently, even by doing that some of the extras settings I’d set up in the advanced settings manager wouldn’t go away. I did a quick bit of “googling” and I came by this command that will reset Compiz to the defaults:
Simply hit Alt+F2 and run:
gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /apps/compiz
Hope this helps some other poor soul that got carried away like I did.
One of the common things I see around the net is people complaining about Ubuntu’s Brown/Orange Human theme. Now I know there is going to be a “new” theme for Intrepid but I just hope as much thought goes into it that apparently went into Human.
I recently tried the new Unity theme in ‘gnome-themes-extras’ and I made a post to show it off. Now I do like the theme, very much, but I ended up switching back to Human. Why? I don’t know - it just feels right I guess. It’s always been the same in the past for me - I’ll try other themes and always without exception, I go back to the default Ubuntu Human.
Perhaps, subconciously I just feel that human is “right” somehow - it’s the first visual cue that says - hey this is an Ubuntu machine I’m on - I just hope whatever theme is created/decided upon for 8.10 is as recognizable as only Ubuntu and has that “just right” feel to it that Human has.
But I think the new Unity theme for GNOME is really hot.
Available in Ubuntu “sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extras”.
EDIT: updated to include wallpaper which suited the theme better (I think, anyway).
Last month I had written a post breifly talking about Ubuntu Hardy Hearon including Likewise Open allowing an Ubuntu desktop seamless integration into Active Directory. I decided to try it out today at work with a virtual machine just to see how seamless it was, and compare it to my previous test with openSUSE. Overall, the openSUSE experiement was “easier” to set up, as it was part of the installation process. With Ubuntu, I had to finish the install (having created a local user in the setup process), log in as that local user and install Likewise Open.
After getting the package installed, it was a matter of doing a simple command:
sudo domainjoin-cli join your.domain username
Followed by:
sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaultssudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open startThe whole process was very painless, and I was pleased with the results. While the openSUSE process seemed more integrated into the install process, Ubuntu w/ Likewise seemed to be more integrated into the domain. For example, in openSUSE, I could access SMB shares w/o authenticating, but Ubuntu actually recognized the DFS shares rather than the individual shares, so it was more like what I’d see on a Windows box.
I was also able to set up printing to one of the network printers via SMB, and I was able to get Evolution accessing my Exchange mailbox.
All in all, I was pretty impressed!
Since my blog is now being aggregated over at Planet Ubuntu Users I thought since I would probably have a new set of readers that I would introduce myself a little bit.
I live in Darlington, SC and I work by day as a Network Administrator for a software company. At work, I mostly deal with Windows servers, but we are in the process to moving vmware based virtual servers, as well as some physical servers over to XenServer, so I get a little “taste” of Linux at work now
On the home front, I started dual booting Linux with Red Hat 6.1 back in 1999 and with the exception of a few attempts to run Windows Vista since I received a gratis copy on release in Jan ‘06 (none of which lasted more than a few weeks) my home system has been running exclusively some flavor of Linux since 2003. After staying with Red Hat until using Fedora Core 1 for a couple of weeks, I moved on to Slackware and I stayed there until getting my first AMD64 system back in 2005. I started looking for an AMD64 distro and I’d been hearing about this “Ubuntu Thing” so I checked out Ubuntu 5.10. I stuck with Ubuntu exclusively until shortly after 7.04 was released and I started getting restless and wanted to try some other distros out - I hopped around a bit and tried out Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE, slamd64 (an AMD64 port of Slackware), Mandriva, Debian and most recently took Foresight for a spin. I have in the end wound up coming back to Ubuntu becuase it simply works for me. Having used Ubuntu for so long, I know it (and Debian itself) much better than any other distro out there, and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that none of the other distros are any better (or for the most part worse) than Ubuntu - just different.
Ubuntu is quickly becoming the defacto standard for Desktop Linux Distributions, and is really starting to become more popular on the server side of things - I don’t think it’ll be long before we see Ubuntu pushing Red Hat and Novell out of the datacenters. The admins that run those system are going to be running Ubuntu on their workstations (or at home), and they are going to want uniformity within the organization…It’s just a matter of time (that’s my fortune telling deed for the year!).
Anyway - thanks for adding me to Planet Ubuntu Users - I’ve been getting more deeply etched into the Ubuntu community - I just discovered Ubuntu Answers on Launchpad so I’ve been digging through some of those questions over the weekend, and you can usually find me on various Ubuntu mailing lists as well as various Ubuntu channels on Freenode (I’m jayson_r on Freenode) in the evenings and on weekends.
Here’s an informative article I just came across about KVM and Xen.
To compare KVM to other solutions:
- In many ways, VMware is a groundbreaking technology. VMware manages to fully virtualize the notoriously complex x86 architecture using software techniques only, and to achieve very good performance and stability. As a result, VMware is a very large and complex piece of software.
- KVM, on the other hand, relies on the new hardware virtualization technologies that have appeared recently. As such, it is very small (about 10,000 lines) and relatively simple. Another big difference is that VMware is proprietary while kvm is open source.
- Xen is a fairly large project, providing both paravirtualization and full virtualization. It is designed as a standalone kernel, which only requires Linux to perform I/O. This makes it rather large, as it has its own scheduler, memory manager, timer handling, and machine initialization.
- KVM, in contrast, uses the standard Linux scheduler, memory management, and other services. This allows the kvm developers to concentrate on virtualization, building on the core kernel instead of replacing it.
- Qemu is a userspace emulator. It is a fairly amazing project, emulating a variety of guest processors on several host processors, with fairly decent performance. However, the userspace architecture does not allow it to approach native speeds without a kernel accelerator. kvm recognizes the utility of qemu by using it for I/O hardware emulation. Although kvm is not tied to any particular userspace, the qemu code was too good not to use — so we used it.
