The State of the Linux

It's been a while since I've posted but I'm still around. I started this blog as a sharing of tips and fixes I which used and couldn't find anywhere else. I've easily found most things I've wanted to do in the last few years so I haven't had the need to make much noise.

Today I'm here to write about the state of desktop Linux as I see it, compared to when this blog started in 2008 and I was obviously using Ubuntu.

These days I am a Fedora user. This was mostly brought about by starting to use RHEL at work and the need to become familiar with regular use of the RPM-based distro. I've also changed all my own servers over to CentOS.

Fedora's okay. Some people may deny this, but I think it's obviously a dumping ground for features Red Hat want to try, or to have the Fedora community crowdsource most of the initial testing and bugfixing before doing their own QA for inclusion in RHEL.

Fedora's near-bleeding-edge package cycles, still with a focus on stability, is both its strength and its weakness. It's great having the kernel or Wine updated in-distro within a week of new major upstream releases. It's frustrating having to deal with "latest and greatest" features I dislike such as GNOME 3 and systemd. I generally find Yum/rpm to be greatly messy and inferior compared to apt.

GNOME 3 is probably the largest thing to happen to desktop Linux in the last few years. It was met with such a hugely negative response and such polarising opinions that sites are still running polls about it. I think the developers made a mistake, sticking their head in the sand and telling users that the forced paradigm shift to Gnome Shell was what they wanted, despite the fact many people said they didn't.

Many Linux users appear to be seeking alternatives to Gnome Shell and all the competing Desktop Environments (KDE, XFCE, LXDE) have probably seen an increase in user base. Linux Mint listened to their users and pursued the MATE fork of GNOME 2, then created the Cinnamon Desktop. This fulfilling of majority demand has pushed them to the top of Distrowatch and kept them there. Kudos to the Mint Team for putting their money where their mouth is.

Ubuntu chose Unity over Gnome Shell. I've tried Unity several times and have been disgusted by it. It's so un-useable that I consider it just plain broken. I think it's pushing Ubuntu into irrelevance and their declining rating on Distrowatch tends to agree.

Mint used to be based on Ubuntu and have now started offering a re-base on Debian. CrunchBang also used to be based on Ubuntu and has switched to Debian altogether. Ubuntu's own variants Kubuntu and Xubuntu have fallen from sponsored releases to just "officially recognised" community projects.

I considered Ubuntu to be the king of Linux distros for a long time, but its reign is now well and truly over.

One interesting distro I saw on a magazine is Fuduntu. The name is ridiculous but the product itself is worth a look. It's a fork of Fedora 14 which has gone rolling-release. It still runs GTK2 and SysV Init but incorporates the latest 3.x kernel series. It has a smaller package set than Fedora and runs a Mac-like desktop environment based around a top-of-screen Gnome Panel and Avant Window Navigator.

My own desktop these days is Openbox with tint2 panel, a minimalist throwback from my days as an Arch Linux user.

Arch itself is a good distro with a great community, full of positive helpful people, few (if any) jerks, and little politics. However, I found myself spending around a quarter of my computer time just maintaining my system, rather than using the computer to do other things. Arch is something all Linux enthusiasts should do once for a period of time, the amount of tinkering and low-level micro-management required is educational and improves your Linux skills, but I feel it also is very much "using Linux for the sake of using Linux".

There seems to be a big paradigm shift happening all over desktops these days. Unity and GNOME 3 led for Linux and seem to have failed, Microsoft have shown their Metro interface which must be a bad joke. It's as if the development world has suddenly and unanimously decided the "menu and taskbar" interface which began with Windows 95 is no longer good enough, but nobody's come up with a suitable replacement, except perhaps Cinnamon.

Which desktop eventually wins out is still anyone's guess. Mint has shown that it's not necessarily the big corporate-backed developers who set the trend. Maybe we will never see one true new standard environment and modular personalised DEs will be the order of the day.

mapping middle-click to a keyboard key under fedora

By far the most popular post on this blog was my old mapping middle-click to a keyboard key trick, which worked well under Ubuntu at the time.

Since then I've switched to Fedora which doesn't package old X11 tools like xkbset. However, this is such a useful thing to have on a laptop I've found a way.

We'll need the xdotool package, so yum install xdotool.

Then under the settings of your Window Manager, simply create a shortcut to xdotool click 2.

Under the default Gnome 3 desktop, this is in the Keyboard page of gnome-control-center.

Under Openbox, we'd add an entry to rc.xml like this

<keybind key="Menu">
  <action name="Execute">
    <command>xdotool click 2</command>
  </action>
</keybind>

And we're done!

xdotool can actually do a whole heap more than just emulate keyboard and mouse events, check out the author's webpage for more info!

what to do after a fresh ubuntu lucid install

some things are pretty annoying about lucid, specifically the lack of icons in the gnome menu and the stupid window buttons being in a difference place

over at webupd8 there is a handy script which fixes all of this and more. you can follow the instructions there, get the latest version from https://launchpad.net/ubuntustart/+download or just do this in a terminal

sudo apt-get install zenity
wget http://launchpad.net/ubuntustart/0.4.x/0.4.9/+download/ubuntu-10.04-start-0.4.9.7.tar.gz
tar -xvf ubuntu-10.04-start-0.4.9.7.tar.gz
cd ubuntu-10.04-start/
sudo ./ubuntu-10.04-script

i'd suggest not ticking the GetDeb option (last option at the bottom) as this just slowed things down and broke audacious for me

combine this with the excellent Ubuntu Tweak and i have lucid looking and performing exactly how i want

lucid has no volume icon in system tray

one of the differences in upgrading to lucid is that the volume control is now in the "indicator applet", which i remove because it annoys me

to add this back into the system tray, simply run gnome-volume-control-applet

you can add this to your default session in System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications

Cannot unmount volume - Cannot remove directory

Often when unplugging my USB thumb drive, I get a dialog box saying

I started looking into why this is, and found that duplicate entries in /media/.hal-mtab are to blame, probably from situations where my drives have either not mounted or unmounted properly.

The fix is easy, simply unmount any extra drives, and sudo rm /media/.hal-mtab

Problem solved!

User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored

There's been a few users on Ubuntuforums, myself included, who have had this error pop up as they log in:

The error seems pretty obvious, that the file listed ~/.dmrc has the wrong permissions. The fix for this is easy, at a terminal, do the following, replacing the word username with your username:

sudo chown username /home/username/.dmrc
chmod 644 /home/username/.dmrc

Except I don't have a .dmrc file to do this to, so what could be causing the error? After a bit of hunting around, I found this can also pop up if your home directory has global write permissions. The fix for this is just as easy. Again at a terminal:

sudo chmod 755 /home/username/

which gives other users read access to your home directory. Or if you'd prefer it private, then

sudo chmod 700 /home/username/

will work as well.

Log out, log in again, and the error screen should go away!

Nautilus Trash won't empty?

Every now and then, I get a file in my Trash/Garbagebin which just won't go away. I'm guessing there's a file somewhere which my user doesn't have permission to delete, but wound up in the bin anyway?

It's easily fixed tho, it just needs a root user to go into the Trash folder, and delete manually. One can accomplish this with the command:

gksu nautilus /home/username/.local/share/Trash/files

and remove whatever you find.