Seeing as I did a complete re-installation rather than an upgrade I half expected that it was going to take me a week or so to get things back to that warm and fuzzy zone. Not so, everything is nicely organized and I’ve actually started re-using some services that sort of fell by the wayside and now feel re-energized and more productive. The combination of Beagle, Gnome Deskbar, Liferea, Mozilla, and Foxylicious plus del.icio.us is a one hell of a force in organizing and perusing through the detrius of my online life.
My desktop is very OSX-y in that I prefer an application bar at the bottom for all my regular tasks and applications and the main menu bar on top and both these panels are set yo autohide to maximize screen real estate. The single most used item for me is on the bottom panel between Liferea and the calculator: Gnome Deskbar. From there I can launch applications, search with Beagle or any of my MyCroft engines, as well as both my normal bookmarks and my del.icio.us ones. It is that damn cool.
This is a good example of what Beagle can do; searching for the word “Books” returns some PDFs, IM conversations, news feeds, applications, and folders. Tied in with the Gnome Deskbar I can also search across my bookmarks and surfing history.
Now I’m not the biggest fan of Rhythmbox as its iTunes inspired interface does little to excite me and, like iTunes, it pretty much sucks for managing large collections. However, the one huge thing going for it is SMB support so I can easily point it at my backup music server (running Ubuntu but only holding 30% of all my music) and have my collection at my fingertips for playback and with native last.fm support I can keep track of all my listening habits.
With a kid on the way I’ve decided to get a little more serious about keeping track the photos I take and I’ve found F-Spot to be very intuitive and adept for that task. Highlights include the slider bar to search photos by date and the tagging feature which helps in providing metatags to group photos across the collection.
Needless to say this release of Ubuntu has taken it to the next level and I’m back to that bubbling feeling of joy when using my laptop. When trees stop falling on my house I have to pull out the old PayPal account and make a donation as the work they and the rest of the OpenSource community are doing is worth paying for.
Lookin’ good. I just installed Dapper on one of my x86 machines. I have to admit, for web browsing and general media playback, it is a sweet setup, you can’t beat the price.
Content creation, thats a different story. I wish someone would make a true Photoshop competitor, and don’t say Gimp, it is nowhere close. PS and Final Cut Pro are keeping me on the Mac for a while.
Ubuntu has really made Linux a great setup with its ease of use. I started playing around with linux in 98 with RedHat, it was extremly painful, but now Linux is a real thing of beauty.
Well, I suppose that Gimp my not make the cut if you have spent a good portion of your professional life on Photoshop and I have heard complaints from PS purists saying that Gimp can do odd things with color and saturation levels. However, the light editing that I do Gimp and Inkscape work out just fine but then again I’m only cropping photos or manipulating them to make banners like the one above.
On the video editing front, I have not tried anything yet but I’ve heard rumors about Cinelerra and Kino. To be honest I know even less about video than I do about photos and of that I know just a little less than nothing. That said, if you want to drop some user created beats on your movies LMMS is a pretty solid app! In lieu of building a studio I’ve been finding it handy to keep my drum loop skills honed.
I need to check out that LMMS, from the screenshots it looks like a good program.
Are you minimizing apps to thumbnails up there? I’ll have to try that out.
Now that I’ve gotten used to Beagle, it seems to be the only way I access ANYTHING.
On the bottom panel? Naw, just shortcuts though thumbnails of the apps will show up in the window selector on the top right panel and in the active app selector in the bottom left panel (between Firefox and the minimize to desktop thingy–its that technical!). I just juiced the size of the panel to some 60px ’cause I like things BIG.
I’m looking at the top panel. It looks like you have the temp, then to the left of that your virtual desktops, then to the left of that _______
“then to the left of that _______” Weather and notification items. Liferea, Rhythmbox, and Gaim followed by network, volume, date and time. A fair share of apps can minimize to there for easy access, a nice feature for us lazy folk.
No, my left.
Specifically, what’s the green rectangle in the middle of the top taskbar?
LOL! Why is it if I have a 50-50 chance I’m wrong 100% of the time (and I really ought have done the old hand signal “L is for Left, Loser!”).
Anyway, that craziness is the System Monitor watching the processor (1st), memory (2nd), and disk (3rd) loads. Under Warty and Hoary I needed it to see at what point the system was going to vapor lock from Firefox and Liferea battling for every last scrap of memory and power.
Now, to tattoo left and right on my hands ala Harry Powell…
Ahh . . . ok, now we’re really communicating! System Monitor, that makes sense. Not very exciting, but it makes sense.
Yeah, really not exciting but it has been useful in the past and gives you something else to look at when compiling, “Look at all the red and green! It’s like Christmas in June!”
If you are looking for some app candy check out the gDesklets, the RSS and weather feeds pinned to the desktop are pretty cool.