What happened to the Gnome desktop?

G'day to ya! Hope the New Year has brought good things to you and yours.

The Gnome software project has brought dramatic change to the Gnome 3 desktop over previous versions. The layout and feel are more akin to mobile devices than the older desktops. For someone like me the upgrade was almost painful enough to make me give Gnome up altogether. I briefly considered KDE since there is a new version available. The new look has however grown on me.

The first thing I hated was the desktop switcher was just gone. Wrong. It's as simple as CTRL-ALT and the up/down arrow or just clicking on "Activities" in the top left corner and making a selection. In the end I find this an improvement.

 Click on "Activities" or hit the "Windows" key and you select "Applications" you see a screen similar to that above. The search box in the top right hand corner allows searching by name. As you enter a text string the icons change, narrowing against probable(random?) matches. YMMV

Default key bindings have been fine for me once I learned them. The "Windows" key gives the same action as clicking on "Activities"  My hands don't have to leave the keyboard to grab the mouse. Very useful when you want to switch between windows or applications in full screen.

A post on RedHat's forum (comment #3) had the following instructions in it in reference to changing the key bindings.

"Open System Settings.
Click Keyboard and navigate to the 'Shortcuts' tab.
Choose 'System' on the left column, and you can change the 'Show the activities overview' shortcut by highlighting it and pressing Backspace."

Also found this nice You Tube video showing how to customize the login, background and other settings.

There is also a newly forked desktop environment meant to give a traditional  (Gnome 2ish) feel called Cinnamon now at version 1.1.3 It seems to be available and hosted by Linux Mint. An ebuild is available in Gentoo. After all choices are a good thing.

Rewrite: How to use USE and Gentoo dependencies support

Good morning ladies and Gentoo-men. For today's mental exercise you are instructed to prove the Pythagorean Theorom

Editors Note: This is a rewrite to address some things in the previous version and make it more informative.

At one of the last LUG meetings I attended; a discussion with one user of Slackware turned up the topic of dependencies. In Slackware AFAIK since I have not used it in several years you get what Patrick Volkerding gives you.
I have not seen a way to do this with Debian or other distributions and it is one of the ways Gentoo is unique.

In Gentoo dependencies are pulled in by USE flags in several ways. In /etc/make.conf they are enabled on a global basis. This means when they are defined here every package on the box that can support that flag will be compiled with support in your application. Let's take some real world examples.

The pam USE flag adds support for pluggable authentication modules and I suspect that it is enabled on every Gentoo profile. ipv6 since it is all the rage and brings many new features to networking as well. However there have been some issues with ipv6 and my router (the communications point for the home network) does not support it. So making use of the global properties as in the following line removes support system wide without having to do it on a package by package basis which is currently done by hand. Instead just add this to /etc/make.conf

USE="-ipv6"

Initial system flags on Gentoo installations are determined by the system profile which is set through 'eselect' To view or set your profile is as easy as running the following command in your shell. Here I have selected the AMD64 Gnome desktop profile as is indicated with the *

localhost david # eselect profile list
Available profile symlink targets:
[1] default/linux/amd64/10.0
[2] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop
[3] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/gnome *
[4] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/kde
[5] default/linux/amd64/10.0/developer
[6] default/linux/amd64/10.0/no-multilib
[7] default/linux/amd64/10.0/server
[8] hardened/linux/amd64
[9] hardened/linux/amd64/selinux
[10] hardened/linux/amd64/no-multilib
[11] hardened/linux/amd64/no-multilib/selinux
[12] selinux/2007.0/amd64
[13] selinux/2007.0/amd64/hardened
[14] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64
[15] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/desktop
[16] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/developer
[17] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/hardened
[18] selinux/v2refpolicy/amd64/server


Changing your profile greatly affects the packages installed on your system and should be done likely only once.

In order to tailor a system and only install the applications you want you can specify USE flags on a per package basis
Create the file /etc/portage/package.use if it is not there already and add your per-package Use flags there. Here is a short listing from mine on a new build adding gallium, llvm, gles support for mesa. As well as the ones I set for some mail programs, X etc.

##Global flags are set by the profile too
localhost david # cat /etc/portage/package.use
sys-devel/llvm llvm-gcc udis86
media-libs/mesa gles
sys-devel/gcc lto objc objc++ objc-gc
dev-cvs/git emacs cvs subversion gtk
dev-libs/udis86 pic
sys-libs/pam audit
app-portage/eix sqlite tools optimization
# For courier-imap support
net-mail/courier-imap -ipv6 gnutls
net-libs/courier-authlib vpopmail
# To satisfy lxde-meta
x11-libs/cairo X
x11-libs/pango X
sys-fs/udev extras
# add gnome-keyring support to gnome-base/gvfs
gnome-base/gvfs gnome-keyring
# X for freetype
media-libs/freetype X
#and I add what I want to satisfy dependencies
gnome-base/gconf policykit
sys-auth/consolekit policykit


At present I can ssh in from the random host so progress ;-) Installing via ethernet but plan to wireless the new build soon.

As to the topic by manipulating the file package.use and editing the USE line in /etc/make.conf you can tailor your Gentoo install. Running emerge -vp world or system will show you how dependencies are set on your system now and you can tailor your system and achieve a more stable host since by eliminating unneeded dependencies one can eliminate bugs that might be pulled in by them.

You may wish to run eselect profile set $ where $ is the value your system supports and see what emerge -vp world will show on different profiles but remember where you started so you can set it back if you don't wish to change anything. Proper building steps would include first choosing a profile then editing USE in /etc/make.conf and package.use to achieve fine grained control over dependencies on Gentoo linux.

Linux wireless

I've written about some of what works for my hardware. 2 boxes currently running Gentoo.Network manager has never worked for me on either of these. Gentoo bug #345143 I had no luck trying to setup Gentoo and wireless as it is currently documented.

For me what worked was using instead 'emerge -vp iw wireless-regdb crda' and configuring wpa thru wpa_cli wpa_passphrase and two files /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/conf,d/net

As of version Connman 0.70 it does load the card properly but when it does it loses the routing table and I would have to add it each time I start up connman. ;-( Guess I could add it to local till they get it fixed or I find out what is the issue and then emerge gconnman and actually have a gui for networks. It also over writes /etc/resolv.conf without regard for using the nameservers provided by dhcp

I've a half completed application for arch tester. Got halfway and just not sure I want to dedicate the time. Also wondering what restrictions would come with actual association. Even generated a gpg key so I could sign email. I do like contributing but in actuality my profession and family life come first. Dedicating 20+ hours a week on a consistent basis is not likely. Could certainly host on a dedicated ip cheaply enough and give others access to the hardware on a speedy connection at times As is flameeyes power usage and my own high electric bills make me think twice about even running so much hardware.

In fact updating my pc's and a slight rate reduction last month dropped $80 from my utility bill this month. Modern hardware is providing more computing power at far less energy cost. One would think there would be new pc's flying off the shelf in the low and mid-range. This Coding Horror blog shows an energy reduction of 75% for hardware purchased today versus that purchased just 5 years ago.

Random progress

So now the hard drive has been moved to it's new home. A dual core pentium 4 and it lives further on sata2

I had run about 9 passes of memtest 86 and have done an emerge -e system since then. Everything is pretty stable.
Did have a bug report but this was an issue that occurred long before moving to this hardware but bug-buddy was
unable to report due to the keyboard failing to work when nautilus crashed. After moving from Nvidia/AMD 64 to radeon/dual core P4 I was able to type in my email address which was preventing the crash report.

The ATI TV 650 reports as

02:00.0 Multimedia controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 4d51
Subsystem: ATI Technologies Inc Device b041
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
Memory at ff400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Memory at dc000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint, MSI 00

I do not see the Xcieve module loading via lsmod. I do have I believe the proper firmware installed for the Xcieve 3028
I built much of v4l/tuner in kernel as modules Likely will try installing a tv app (after re-check MSI in kernel support)

Rescued a docking station for tuxmobl It was a timely event as it was on it's way to the great electronics graveyard in the sky

I am quite satisfied with the new Windows laptop it is snappy and capable. I have yet to try to boot a linux on that machine yet. May try a liveusb image at some point. The biggest drawback was the lack of hdmi Although the vga out is compatible with about any conference room in the US and a ton of image projectors.

At a time when labor is taking a beating sellable skills are still at a premium and so things may change for me soon.

For anyone using Gentoo please avail yourself of the 'eclean' command I have suggested some enhancements but it is already very useful.

Making a better distribution of Gentoo

G'day mate! Today we advocate not only mental but physical stimulation and your homework assignment is to master the boomerang.

My Gentoo installation on the Dell Inspiron 8000 (nee tuxmobl) shows some progress now since I have managed to successfully start X and obtain an LXDE desktop. Network access is currently through the PCMCIA card and I have yet to try the laptops built in NIC jack that would not work under M$. I can ssh in and set it building while working from 'random' host; which I did yesterday. Once set to a task I checked on some of my open bugs and posted a new blog. Flameeyes has hardware issues and reported he is not able to do tinderbox runs at least where it concerns the packages I use I can try to pick up some small portion of the work.Since updating to gcc-4.5.1 I am currently running 'emerge -e world' on the the 'random' host At 12:00 pm EST there are 290 of 856 packages done.

As the laptop installation proceeds I am forced to make choices concerning hal and udev. Since hal is going away but the documentation still outlines hal and until Gentoo migrates to openrc and baselayout2 hal is still used on Gentoo stable AFAIK With laptops there is the whole battery runlevel and issues of power management as I progress through the problems I intend to post updates here. Further there was discussion I recall on using i2c versus lm_sensors.

The 'random' host has already been migrated to openrc and baselayout2 and seem to be fine running udev without hal. The only thing that at last check actually still required hal on that system was the gnome-gvfs IIRC I chose gnome for a desktop on it since it seemed the easiest way to manage a working install without hal.

I must also keep in mind some kind of solution where integrating the other boxes into the network better yields access to what the linux and windows boxes here can do. Like shared printing and a shared rsync solution between hosts random and tuxmobl Then there is a little router project I have in mind as well.

Good luck with your own tasks. And enjoy a sunset near you with a friend. I'm off the weekend and hope to make some progress then so keep checking back.

From 'tuxmobl' to asparagus

Greetings fellow penguins and good day. I've edited the ticker above to add interesting articles about linux and embedded news. Breadboarding has come so far these last 30 years ;-) For today's mental exercise you are instructed to build a 4 bit binary counter from NOR gates.

I came by some older hardware in trade for labor. A Dell Inspiron 8000 with a fair battery, 1GHz Coppermine CPU and 256 MB of ram. It also had a 10GB hard drive and Windows XP installed. A 'hwoarang' version that seemed quite nice and incorporated some of the look of Windows 7.

I upgraded the memory to 512 MB and changed the hard drive out for a 40GB drive and booted a Knoppix 6 cd and used the 'alternate-install' method to chroot and install Gentoo. Along the way I found the onboard NIC seems to be bad but I have a Xircom PCMCIA card that provides 10/100 MB ethernet, a modem and 1394 and used that. The system came with an internal CDRW and the 2 bays can use 2 batteries or a DVD player and a floppy drive in some combination all of which came with it. So I thought all this worth salvage since it has a nice keyboard and screen as well even if the hardware is rather dated and everything worked in Windows.

The install went well till ready to boot the new kernel. Then issues with the graphics driver and the aty128fb driver it should have worked with yielded a blank screen. I chrooted back into the system and took all reference to any framebuffer except the default kernel framebuffer out and rebooted and have since rebuilt the system with -march=native Choosing a GUI of LXDE for a lightweight graphical display yields

tuxmobl runlevels # emerge -vp lxde-meta

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

emerge: there are no ebuilds built with USE flags to satisfy ">=x11-libs/cairo-1.6[X,svg]".
!!! One of the following packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-libs/cairo-1.8.10 (Change USE: +X)
(dependency required by "x11-libs/gtk+-2.20.1-r1" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "lxde-base/lxsession-edit-0.1.1" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "lxde-base/lxde-meta-0.5.0-r1" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "lxde-meta" [argument])

Seems like this USE flag should have been provided and I'll need to look into how the ebuild sets it and maybe others won't see the issue as soon as I get the system doing something useful and get something to eat.

Thinking mushroom and cheese omelets and some asparagus with toast sounds good Even a bit of a splurge since asparagus is something I don't treat myself to much. I had some under a dripping air conditioner once that sprouted some nice ones years ago. On that note as soon as I can change the layout here there will be some other topics including food. Hmmm hope blogger has the features I want. ;-) since I want to be able to have this be kind of a meta-blog with the subs having their own RSS