Richard A. Johnson

Well, I lost a bet this week and the result was I had to use GNOME for 1 month. I could easily cheat, but I wanted to go through with it and see what I have “supposedly been missing.” Well after day 1, I have to admit that after listening to Jorge talk about the Dust theme, I have a somewhat pretty lookin’ desktop.

So, I went ahead and installed Empathy to chat with my buds, Gnome-Do because everyone ooh’s and ahh’s over it, and Gwibber, so I can tweet in style. I tried using the Gnome-Do Twitter plugin, but it didn’t work at all for me. Well it worked a little, as in I could see others tweets, but it didn’t like mine at all. Always said it had some sort of authorization error.

I am impressed with the quality of GNOME these days and I have to take my hat off to all of those involved. GNOME still is not for me, and probably never will be, but it is fun from time-to-time to check out the competition. I have GNOME on my home desktop, but the rest of my machines are either KDE 4 (4.1.3 Kubuntu and Trunk with Debian), and WMII (umph!).

Let me explain this briefly and why I am giving Kubuntu 1 and Ubuntu a 0 in this one aspect, which to me is very important, I mean very important!

I have a xorg.conf configuration that is very simple, all I do is add a virtual config to it that states I want my desktop to be 3360×1050, as I have 2 monitors that are 1680×1050.

Now with this same exact xorg.conf, Kubuntu Intrepid works like a champ with utilizing the dual monitors in a non-mirroring mode. Ubuntu Intrepid on the other hand, well it is utter garbage with or without Compiz. With Compiz you get nastiness on the 2nd display, and without Compiz you get short changed 3/4 of the 2nd display.

My video card is:
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

Other than this, I do enjoy the way Ubuntu Intrepid has shaped up, and the new wallpaper, oooh I like it! Unless someone can give me the groovyness I need with my dual monitor setup, it is back to my home in Kubuntu land (I told you Harald I wouldn’t be gone long).

EDIT: I have changed the title from Kubuntu 1 – Ubuntu 0 to what it is now. Why? They are both failing right now. In Kubuntu my external screen sits here and blinks, but it is usable. I fixed this issue last week and cannot remember how I did it. I get the following error in Xorg.log:
(EE) intel(0): Unable to write to SDVOCTRL_E for SDVOB Slave 0x70.

As a member of both the Ubuntu Documentation Project and the KDE Documentation Project, one thing is clear, our current state of system help isn’t the greatest. An initiative that the GNOME project has looked at taking on (for the greater part of the past 3 years) is called Project Mallard. There are some things in this project that I like and dislike, however one thing is clear, they understand the inefficiency of their current system and know it needs to be fixed. KDE is realizing this same exact thing and know we need to fix it, but figuring out how to do so correctly, isn’t the easiest thing.

One thing that GNOME, KDE, and others have worked hard to do is collaborate with Freedesktop.org specifications on many levels. Maybe it is time we look at continuing this excellence, but this time add documentation to the menu. How many of you GNOME users love using Amarok or another KDE application, but hate the fact that KHelpCenter is installed just so you can view the help documentation? Granted a lot of this has been fixed by just recommending KHelpCenter in the packages, but this doesn’t fix the issue, because now you have a .docbook file to read, and guess what, Yelp isn’t going to open it cleanly for you, or at least the last time I looked at Yelp it didn’t. Or you have KDE and want to open up the .xml file with KHelpCenter, but it just doesn’t work correctly. I think if we were to unify documentation we could move toward the goal of world domination

Would working closely together help fix our issues, would this be a good thing? What would be the “best” way to move forward?

No, not a masquerade party, but a Tasque’rade party! After hanging out with Jorge Castro and Joe Brockmeier last weekend at Penguicon, I was beat up with Gnome quite a bit. Being the groovy KDE dude that I am, I hung around and listened to their Gnome speak, and even sat in on Joe’s openSUSE talk. During Joe’s talk he introduced a great application called Tasque for the Gnome desktop. After showing some interest in this application, Jorge asked me to package Tasque for all of you. Well since Jorge fed me a lot of beer last weekend, I went ahead and did just that. As of right now, I built 2 packages, one for Hardy of course and the other for Gutsy.

If you are using Hardy and want to give Tasque a look over, then add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tasque-packagers/ubuntu hardy main

If you are using Gutsy, then add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tasque-packagers/ubuntu gutsy main

EDIT: I have had 2 people now tell me that Tasque gives an error that has something to do with evolution-sharp missing. I don’t have that issue, so if you can narrow it down, I would appreciate it. I am the furthest thing from a Gnome dev imaginable. Thanks!