unity – Accidents Happen

Faenza icons and porn lenses [Ubuntu]

thameera — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:19:04 +0000

I’ve been installing stuff and tinkering with the new Ubuntu install for the past three hours. There’s a good collection of Unity lenses listed here. Sadly, the porn lens doesn’t seem to work, at least in my country.

The Faenza icon set and the Faience theme are the shizz! Gives everything a decent look, much much better than the original Ambiance theme. Instructions can be found here. After installing, I set the themes using Unsettings, a new handy tool for messing with Unity settings.

Some other stuff installed today were nautilus-dropbox, preload (which speeds up the OS by pre-loading mostly used apps) and guake.

Everpad hits 2.0

thameera — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:05:32 +0000

Installed Ubuntu 12.10 yesterday (see the post in the other blog). One of the first things to install in the new OS was Everpad, an Evernote client integrated to Ubuntu and Unity, and found out that it’s been updated to 2.0. Now you can attach pictures and add tables to the notes. Sync issues seem to have reduced as well.

But the best thing is that Everpad is in active development. We badly need a good Evernote client for Linux, something better than NixNote. Everpad is on the move.

Dual monitors on Ubuntu with Nvidia

thameera — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 07:45:26 +0000

UPDATE: With Ubuntu 12.10, you can just go to Displays and turn off Sticky Edges.

So I plugged in the VGA cable of my new hp monitor, and guess what, the system didn’t recognize the newcomer. In most cases it should just detect the display, but it didn’t work in this case. The solution was to go to the X Server Display Configuration in Nvidia X Server Settings and click Detect Displays.

The next problem was when moving the mouse from one display to another, the pointer would slow down and wait for a few moments at the Unity launcher. This seems to be by design, but it’s a nuisance. The fix is going to /apps/compiz-1/plugins/unityshell/screen0/options in gconf-editor and changing the values of overcome_pressure and stop_velocity to 1 and 20 respectively. Later learned that you can edit these settings simply using the Ubuntu Unity plugin in CCSM.

Workspaces in Unity [Ubuntu]

thameera — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:16:00 +0000

Most Linux distros come with multiple workspaces built-in. Why do people need multiple workspaces? To organize your work of course! You may read a book and take notes in one workspace while browsing the web and chatting on another.

Unity has evolved from a nuisance to a really user-friendly and fun-to-use desktop environment. But, problem -> Unity uses a common launcher to all its workspaces: hence it displays the apps opened in all the workspaces. Where’s the organization here? There’s a bug filed in launchpad addressing this issue at length, but the developers doesn’t seem to find it a priority. If you think this is a concern, please answer ‘Yes’ to the question Does this bug affect you?