Hot answers tagged desktop-environment
13
How can I fix it so that launching of Nautilus does not bring GNOME background?
The reason that this happens is that Nautilus is not only Gnome's file manager it's also responsible for drawing Gnome's desktop. So when you start nautilus it renders you desktop because it views that as one of it's responsibilities.
To disable this behavior, invoke it ...
11
In addition to uname -a, which gives you the kernel version, you can try:
lsb_release -idrc # distro, version, codename, long release name
Most Desktop Environments like GNOME or KDE have an "about" or "info" menu option that will tell you what you use currently, so no commandline needed there really.
10
The Wikipedia page on Comparison of X Window Managers sorts the various Window Managers into four categories: Heavyweight, Middleweight, Lightweight, and minimal. You'd probably be interested in those in the minimal category.
Right now, those include Matchbox, sithWM, evilwm, dwm, WMFS, wmii, and scrotwm. (i3 gets put into Lightweight; Xfwm (used by ...
9
I use conky to display date, battery, cpu, ram and swap information. You can find my conky file here or take a look at a thread about conky configs in the arch-linux forum. There you find many different configs and screenshots of conky in use.
9
Ubuntu is a good choice for a first distribution, if you want something you can get up-and-running quickly and easily. You might also consider fedora as well.
You can certainly theme an Ubuntu installation. See this thread for a good starting point - HowTo: theme your desktop
9
From the bottom up:
Xorg, XFree86 and X11 are display servers. This creates the graphical environment.
[gkx]dm (and others) are display managers. A login manager is a synonym. This is the first X program run by the system if the system (not the user) is starting X and allows you to log on to the local system, or network systems.
A window manager controls ...
8
A window manager's task is to do window placement/layout (tiling, overlapping, resizing, ...), add decorations (min/max/close buttons, window menu, pretty title bar, ...), deal with input focus policies (focus follow mouse for instance), and that's about it.
When people refer to desktop environments, they usually mean a window manager plus a set of base ...
8
Did you have a look at some other "lighterweight" ;-) window managers?
I'm completly happy with i3 for example: http://i3.zekjur.net/
It's just a tiling windowmanger with demnu for launching applications. No desktop, no other special features and the binary is just some Kbs.
There are a lot others in this range:
evilwm - http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/
...
7
The simple way is to invent a time machine, visit the various people who devised shell startup files and tell them to cleanly distinguish between three things:
session setup, e.g. environment variables;
session launching, i.e., e.g. starting a command-line shell or a window manager or running startx;
shell initialization, e.g. aliases, prompt, key ...
6
I'm running Compiz standalone right now. Works just fine. I followed the instructions on the Arch Linux Compiz wiki page; see especially the section As a Standalone Window Manager.
6
I asked a similar question once. It is definitely a good idea if you find yourself ignoring the miscellaneous tools and features that come with the desktop environment.
The solution is, you don't need to install a desktop environment (or anything you don't use), just a window manager of your choice. I (also) asked another question about lightweight window ...
6
I know how you feel; I tried so many different distros before getting a feel for the differences, and I continue to try new ones, usually in a virtual machine or a spare partition.
I don't really find Gnome to be slow and bloated, but I'm not too happy with the direction it's gone recently with the Gnome 3 shell. Gnome is fairly simple compared to KDE, but ...
5
If you see a message telling you that a menu entry has been created, it means the package has dropped a file into /usr/share/menu describing one or more menu entry, as per the Debian menu policy. The documentation of the menu system (also available in /usr/share/doc/menu) explains the syntax of this file. Each window manager is supposed to include the system ...
5
As @milk pointed out, you can use uname -a and that will tell you information on all the UNIXes I have access to. For example, on Linux:
Linux localhost 2.6.33.6-147.2.4.fc13.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jul 23 17:14:44 UTC 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
On FreeBSD:
FreeBSD localhost 6.3-RELEASE-p3-jc1 FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE-p3-jc1 #2: Thu Aug 7 14:36:29 PDT ...
5
I've had this exact problem on all my newer KDE installations. It seems to be a bug in KDE though I've not seen anything specific on it. A quick fix that I've used is to change the hight of the toolbar. It seems that if you change the hight to something smaller, the problem disappears forever. It's just at the default height that it has problems.
5
Yes, Gnome and KDE provide some of their own keyboard shortcuts in addition to the ones provided by their respective WMs.
However, this may not mean what you think. The fact that Fn + UpArrow produces the keysym XF86AudioRaiseVolume is mainly due to your laptop's keyboard. You can verify this by using xev again (in the Openbox environment); It should have ...
4
Ubuntu offers all of that:
It was designed from the on-set to be a newbie-friendly Debian; I've used both, and it certainly is easier, at least on the surface (i.e. the basic stuff).
It has some of the largest collection of software of all distros; this includes a whole bunch of development stuff (all major programming languages, a whole bunch web ...
4
You don't need X11 to have a window manager. You can use TWIN, the Text-mode window manager, along with GPM for mouse. You might have to switch your primary web browser to Links and your chat program to Finch, though.
4
You can try wall. On my KDE machine, a small panel pops up with the message sent with wall. Of course, the message also appears in all terminals, but maybe your users do not have a terminal open. Example:
echo "It is 9 o'clock and all is well." | wall
4
You already pointed out two options that I was going to suggest :) Anyway I think it's worth making clear that you have many options.
Stick with Ubuntu 10.04 for now. This is not a long term option, because eventually you will run out of updates (3 years for desktops, 5 years for servers). And who wants to use outdated software anyway, especially when it's ...
4
Simplicity to use and configure often don't go hand in hand. Gnome is supposed to be easy to use, but it's pretty big and doesn't have much in the way of customizability. KDE is also big, and more customizable, but the customization options aren't always straightforward. Other alternatives include LXDE and XFCE, which are more lightweight than either Gnome ...
4
In my experience, the simplest way to transfer environment settings is to copy the user configuration directories wholesale, renaming the existing directories first. In the case of XFCE, that would be ~/.config/xfce4. There may also be necessary files in ~/.local. Be sure to install any requisite software before copying the configuration.
4
Update 1
I believe the feature you are looking for is actually X Window multi-pointer.
From ArchLinux Multi-Pointer X Introduction:
Xorg servers starting from version 1.7 have a feature called
"multi-pointer". Basically it allows to have multiple mouse cursors
(each with its own keyboard focus) on the screen and control them with
separate ...
4
There are many things in your question which indicate that Linux probably won't suit you either.
So, here it goes. I need to make the move from Windows to Linux as I am too pissed off with the many system crashes, numerous and random internet disconnecting issues, trojans, rootkits and malware infections and whatnot, and all of these on a fresh new ...
4
I have used arandr, this utility allows to save a script configuring your two screens. (I know there is also the utilityxrandr but I have not used it.)
I have added this script to my startup in fluxbox (I don't know where to put it for openbox) so each time a session is started, my two monitors get configured.
I don't understand what you mean with desktop ...
3
Before I moved to KDE I was a hardcore Fluxbox user. It has command interface fbrun that can be used to launch programs along with a rightclick customizable menu. It also has window tabs, I believe it's one of the first WM's to have this. IIRC Fluxbox is the WM that Damn Small Linux
uses.
3
You can use:
dpkg -L package-name-goes-here
...to have a list of files that have been installed by the specific package. If you just want executable files:
for file in `dpkg -L package-name-goes-here`
do
if [ -x $file -a ! -d $file ] # must be executable, but not a directory.
then
echo $file
fi
done
Here's a naively, hastily written script ...
3
If you want to go mouseless, you should try a tilling wm. Personally, my favorite is Awesome, but there are plenty in that Question.
As for a composite manager, xcompmgr has already been mentioned, but Cairo Composite Manager (CCM) seems nice too, although I find it less stable still. As always, YMMV.
3
I know many people use XMonad. It is highly configurable and scriptable, it integrates with GNOME etc. The only 'disadvantage' is that it uses Haskell, a beatyful but not so popular purly functional language.
3
I'd say ultimately no. Many things can be swapped out or used together like having both Gnome Terminal and Konsole open. You can also have Dolphin/Konqueror open with Nautilus. You can probably kill the Gnome Panel and start KDE's version of it, but switching the whole desktop is complicated by the session manager. The session manager is the one process ...
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