Posts Tagged GNOME
Making your mixed KDE and GNOME desktop look cool
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on November 18th, 2009
Most people use a mix of QT/KDE and GTK+/GNOME applications on their Linux system. Because both QT and GTK+ use their own widgets (which are all GUI elements, like buttons, toolbars, menus, checkboxes, etc…) and theme engine, QT and GTK+ applications look different from each other. This is especially bad if you use KDE in Debian: in that case by default no GTK+ theme is configured, making GTK+ applications, like Firefox, look like ugly Windows 95 applications. Mandriva on the contrary does use a common graphical theme for both GTK+ and KDE applications (called Ia Ora), but it’s not easy to change the GTK+ theme if you use KDE or the QT/KDE theme if you use GNOME.
Here’s a howto for Debian and Mandriva which explains how to make your desktop look nice if you’re using a mix of KDE and GTK+. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian, this howto might also apply to Ubuntu, but I have not verified this.
Pre-requisites
I assume that you are running either Debian Squeeze (testing) or Mandriva 2010.0 or a more recent version of these distributions. For Mandriva 2010.0, you also need to have activated the Backports repositories. You can activate them in the Mandriva Control Centre – Software Management – Configure media sources.
Using GTK+ applications in KDE
If you want to use a unified look for KDE and GTK+ applications, then I recommend using the QtCurve theme. Just like Mandriva’s Ia Ora, it consists of a theme engine for KDE and another one for GTK+ which looks exactly the same.
In Mandriva you install the kde4-style-qtcurve package. If you have urpmi’s “suggests” support enabled (it is by default), then this will automatically pull in both the KDE 4 and the GTK+ theme, and also systemsettings-qt-gtk, a tool which lets you choose the GTK+ theme to use in KDE.
In Debian you need the packages qtcurve and also system-config-gtk-kde to set up the GTK+ theme.
Once you have installed all packages, you can start KDE’s System Settings and go to Appearance. In the Style page, you can choose the theme to use in KDE applications, while in GTK+ Styles and Fonts, you select the theme used by GTK+ applications. If you choose QtCurve in both, KDE and GTK+ applications will look very similar and even use the same KDE icon set.
The QtCurve theme comes with different pre-defined styles. If you don’t like the default look of QtCurve, go to System Settings – Appearance – Style, and click on the Configure… button next to the QtCurve widget style box. Under the button Options there, you find the list of predefined styles.
Of course you can also further fine-tune the theme by going to the Colors and Windows pages in System Settings – Apperance, where you can choose a colour set and window manager theme to your liking (QtCurve has a matching colour set and window manager theme, but of course you can choose something else if you want).
Using QT/KDE applications in GNOME
If you are using GNOME and want to make QT and KDE applications look like all GNOME applications without using Ia Ora, you have to run the qtconfig application. In both Mandriva and Debian, you need to have the qt4-qtconfig package installed. Then in qtconfig you select GTK+ as the GUI style to use. If you run KDE applications, you will also need to set the KDE theme to GTK+. This can be done by running
$ kwriteconfig --file kdeglobals --group General --key widgetStyle gtk
in a terminal window. Before executing this command, you will need to have the kdebase4-runtime package installed in Mandriva or kdebase-runtime in Debian.
Debian Squeeze KDE 4.3 running Dolphin and Iceweasel (Firefox) 3.5 with the QtCurve theme (Shiny Glass style), Slim Glow Plasma theme and desktop effects enabled.
Updating to Mandriva 2009.1 (Cooker)
Today, the server running this website was update from Mandriva 2009.0 to 2009.1 Cooker by running urpmi –auto-select –allow-suggests with the Cooker mandriva-release package installed. All in all, the update went very smoothly. There was one file conflict in some KDE 4 related packages and I had to restart Apache 2 by hand because a httpd reload done when the awstats package was installed, failed because of the changed glibc. After the update I also removed KDE 4 because I don’t use it. Actually, it’s only extremely exceptional that I use X on this system (it’s mostly running headless), but it’s good to still have GNOME in case I have a problem with my laptop. I did not yet reboot the system; actually it is still running a 2.6.24 RC kernel with an uptime of more than one year. In the not too distant future, it’s possible this system will be migrated to a KVM virtual machine, so then it will definitely get a new kernel.
Last week-end, I also updated my parent’s system to 2009.1 Cooker. Actually, this system was still running Mandriva 2008.1 with KDE 3.5. Here I removed KDE too, and I installed GNOME. I consider KDE to be less stable than GNOME in general and I’ve heard all too often “feature X will only be done in next KDE 4.x release”, that it’s becoming annoying (e.g. just today I read that root support for System Settings was once again delayed to a later KDE release). So far, I haven’t received any complaint worth mentioning, so it seems the migration from KDE 3.5 to GNOME went very smoothly.
So if you are thinking of switching to Cooker, now is a great moment to do it. The OS is very stable, and the last little bugs are being ironed out. Personally I am not suffering from any showstopper bug anymore at this moment. The most annoying thing I’m seeing here, is that the second display is not switched off automatically if it’s disconnected while the machine is suspended and I have my serious doubts this will be fixed soon because Xorg’s bugzilla seems like a blackhole to me… Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to switch it off by hand by using GNOME’s screen resolution applet. All in all Mandriva 2009.1 will definitely be a much better release than 2009.0.
Braindead error message of the day
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on September 20th, 2008
Today this popped up on my GNOME desktop after logging in:
Unable to mount 50.0 GB Encrypted Data
DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply.
Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the
message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or
the network connection was broken.
Filed as GNOME bug #552985.
Testing Mandriva 2008.1 Cooker GNOME
This week-end, I installed Mandriva Cooker in a Virtualbox virtual machine. I did a default GNOME installation, and noted and reported all problems I found, in the hope of improving the quality for when a new alpha or beta version comes out. I did a network installation from my local Cooker mirror (which only has the main repository, no contrib). Here’s a quick summary of the problems I found:
- There are currently problems when installing the / partition on a logical volume using LVM. The problem is known and being worked on. As a work-around, I installed using standard partitions
- The keyboard layout selection dialog is very ugly and confusing, especially when the “More” part is opened. Reported as Mandriva bug #36521.
- When I set the timezone to Europe/Brussels, in the next screen, the local time and UTC time were equal, which is impossible in this timezone. Reported as Mandriva bug #36522
- After the installation, X did not want to start. This was caused by a problem in the Virtualbox display and mouse drivers. This bug was already reported as Mandriva bug #35085.
- When X failed to start, the dialog program was used to show a message informing me that X could not be started. While this message was visible, it seemed like dialog was using 100% of CPU time. I need to verify if I can reproduce this bug.
- After running urpmi –auto-select, the dkms modules could not be build anymore. My kernel was updated, but because Mandriva’s installer did not select kernel-desktop-devel, the kernel-devel package was not updated too. Reported as Mandriva bug #36524
- Mandriva’s update applet mdkonline is way too verbose: when it is checking for updates, it shows a notification bubble stating: “Warning – Please wait, checking for updates”, and if there are no updates available it way say: “Warning – Your system is up to date”. The warning word gives the (wrong) impression something is wrong. And actually these messages don’t really interest me. I just want to be notified if something if wrong or if there are any updates available. Personally, I think this applet should even be completely hidden if there’s nothing to say, so it does not clutter my notification bar. Reported as Mandriva bug #36526
- The Firefox GNOME theme was not installed by default. The problem is that the main repository only contains an outdated version of the theme, which cannot be installed anymore with Mandriva’s Firefox 2.0.0.11 packages. Contrib contains the right version. Reported as Mandriva bug #36513
- Personally I think subpixel font smoothing should be enabled by default because most people use TFT monitors nowadays and without this setting enabled, fonts look too blurry. Even on an old CRT monitor, I found subpixel font smoothing very acceptable and nice to use, so personally I don’t see any reason not to enable this by default.
- The GNOME terminal was unusable: it appeared almost completely transparent and unreadable, including its menus and title bar. Disabling Metacity’s compositing fixed this problem. And it fixed also a problem where the screen would not refresh at all anymore after coming back from screen blanking. When disabling compositing via gconf-editor, the whole GNOME session hung. Reported as Mandriva bug #36527
- In GNOME’s menu System – Preferences – Language and location the Region combobox was completely empty. It seems like this configuration tools also duplicates the functionality found in draklocale (run as user). One of the two should probably be hidden then.
- The eog image viewer was not installed by default. Because of this, images would open in The Gimp, which is not very handy for quickly viewing an image. Reported as Mandriva bug #36520
- When the system starts up, a message is printed: “Warning: Alsa driver is already running”. I guess the alsa or sound service tries to load the module which was already loaded by udev coldplugging before. Actually, years ago, it was said that those two sound services would be merged. This should really be done now, it is confusing because it is not clear what’s the difference between these two services.
- OpenOffice.org requires the hsqldb RPM package. This package installs a service hsqldb, which does not even start without Java JVM. As far as I know, OpenOffice.org does not need this service at all, but just uses the hsqldb Java libraries. The hsqldb package should be splitted then, so that it’s not necessary to install and activate an extra service, which does not even start at all. Reported as Mandriva bug #36472 and Mandriva bug #36427
- Because the openoffice.org-style-tango package was not installed while openoffice.org-style-gnome was, OpenOffice.org defaulted to the default Sun icon theme in large size, which is very ugly. Reported as Mandriva bug #36519
- Personally I would prefer Beagle not to index aggressively when the screensaver is running. I find it very annoying that as soon as my screensaver starts, I hear my hard drive thrashing the whole time.
- Personally I find Epiphany’s minimum font size of 7 much too small. Setting it to 8 gave me comparable and much more easily readable fonts as in Firefox, while not causing any negative effects on web lay-outs (such as unwanted text overflow).
- When starting Rhythmbox for the first time and opening the Edit – Preferences menu item, an error pops up that the Podcasts directory does not exist. Reported already as Mandriva bug #29908 and now also as GNOME bug #507541.
- Mandriva includes some nice documentation, but none of it is installed by default. Reported as Mandriva bug #36518.
- gstraemer-0.10-pulse was not installed because it is in contrib. Reported as Mandriva bug #36517.
- I encountered a Yelp crash, but I had no backtrace, and could not reproduce it.
- PulseAudio creates a whopping 6 menu items in the Sound & Video menu, which makes this menu look very cluttered. I think pavumeter should not be installed (removes two menu items, not a regression, because 2008.0 did not have any VU meters in the menu too), neither should paman (it only gives some technical information which does not really interest me) and padevchooser. Only the volume control should be installed by default, as that’s the only application normal user might use often. Not yet reported, as I think this should be accompanied by some other changes to the task-pulseaudio dependencies and suggestions, about which I need to think a bit more and about which I’ll start a discussion on the mailing list soon.
- I think it could be interesting to install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg by default because it enables playing WMA/ASX files and radio streams in Rhythmbox.
- drakmenustyle is installed by default, while we only really support the Mandriva menu structure. The tool in itself still works, but the default GNOME menus were missing some applications present in Mandriva’s menus, as was expected. In that case, we should probably not install this application by default.
- Still a bunch of faxing applications are installed by default (hylafax-client, efax). Personally I think the number of people having the right hardware to use their system as a fax and the number of people really using such software, is extremely low so that we don’t need to install this by default. Anyway, I have proposed this many times before, and it feels like I’m banging my head against a wall, so I won’t bring this up again.
- Tightvnc and rfbdrake are old applications which are not really maintained anymore. They should be replaced by the much better Vinagre and grdesktop applications, which are much nicer.
- Nautilus is somewhat broken, but this caused by the GVFS transition, and the problems are known, so no need to report this again. Let’s see how this evolves during the next few weeks.