Rowan
I have been using an Ubuntu desktop for quite some time, running Gnome 2.30 on Lucid for the past year-and-a-half. However, with the recent developments in the Gnome- and Ubuntu worlds (everybody hating Unity and Gnome3, and Gnome 2 disappearing from Ubuntu altogether), I decided to check out Xfce and see if that would work for me.
I installed Xfce 4.8 from a PPA. Easy enough. Xfce looks nice enough, and it gives you plenty of options to configure. Besides, if you have a working Gnome environment, some things will just move with you to Xfce. For example, I have been using Avant Window Navigator in Gnome, and it was started in Xfce just the same.
I tweaked the following things to make Xfce behave the way I like it:
The script that I mentioned above (twice), is just this:
xfce4-settings-helper #xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --output VGA1 --auto --right-of HDMI2 ssh-add < /dev/null
The ‘xrandr’ invocation is no longer necessary since I set the X-offset for VGA1 with xfce4-settings-editor. This script is saved somewhere in my homedir, and is run on session-start, by adding it to the list of startup applications via Settings -> Session and Startup -> Application Autostart.
Now, let’s see where it goes 🙂
P.S. I also gave KDE a try, but it was way too slow!
Afgelopen week werd in Eindhoven de 10e editie van de jaarlijkse Dutch Design Week georganiseerd. In de twee weken daarvoor ben ik enkele keren op Strijp-S geweest, in het kader van DDW TV, een pilot-project dat iphion (mijn werkgever) in samenwerking met Met Scherp! en een aantal andere partijen heeft georganiseerd.
Tijdens de werkzaamheden, maar ook tijdens de Dutch Design Week, heb ik wat foto’s gemaakt. De meeste foto’s zijn genomen op Strijp-S bij het Natlab, maar enkele ook op andere lokaties, zoals in de Blob en op het stadhuisplein.
One of the more pleasant discoveries I did in the land of free¹ software, is a web application called Zina. Zina is a recursive acronym, that stands for ‘Zina is not Andromeda’.
Zina is basically a web front-end to your music collection, but it is more than that. It has many features, including a flash player for playing songs locally, a playlist manager, a ratings system, and much more. Once, I created my own application for this purpose, but after getting acquainted with Zina, I dropped my own ‘mp3front’, and decided to stick with Zina.
Now, as we all know, no single piece of software is perfect, and neither is Zina. The biggest drawback is, that it seems to have been abandonned by its author. The latest news posting on the homepage says:
2010 Nov: Zina is on hiatus. Author got married and bought a house.
This means that any improvents that the software might need, we will have to make ourselves.
For my own convenience, but also to open up collaboration with other interested developers, I imported Zina version 2.0b22 into a repository on Github. There, you can browse the source code, including my modifications and download the package. If you are interested in contributing, please let me know. Leave a comment here (registration required) or find me on Twitter.
From the old Help forum on Sourceforge, I understand that Zina doesn’t work with the latest Joomla releases. Since I don’t use Joomla, that would be the perfect thing for you to pick up 🙂
Let’s see where this will go!
¹ Released under GPL v2
Ter ere van de verjaardag van Huub Hangop vandaag een verjaardagslied, gezongen door de meester zelf, voor zichzelf 🙂
Huub, gefeliciteerd!!
I love it when a plan comes together