unity

Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 Enters beta

Michael Reed — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

There are a wealth of changes which can be made to an Ubuntu system that sit in a category that is half way between the obscure and the genuinely useful. Ubuntu Tweak is utility that exposes these options with a handy GUI.

At time of writing the Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 beta can be installed by using the PPA on the website (see this page).

Ubuntu Tweak may be runnable on other Ubuntu powered desktops or even other distros, but it’s clear that it is aimed squarely at users of stock Ubuntu who like to fiddle. There look to be about 100 options which are divided into three main categories which are then divided into further subcategories:

Startup (Login Settings, Session Control)

Desktop (Compiz Settings, Desktop Icon Settings, GNOME Settings, Window Manager Settings)

System (Nautilus Settings, Power Manager Settings, Security Related, Workarounds)

Version 0.6 has switched to an icon pallet interface rather than the list based interface of previous versions. The options themselves could all be classed as useful but not essential. For those of you who haven’t used Ubuntu Tweak before, I’ll pick out some features to give you a flavor of what’s available.

It’s possible to toggle the startup sound, alter the background image of the GDM login screen, remove the restart icon from the Gnome menu and suppress the restart confirmation dialog. The window manager tweaks move into KDE territory as you can tweak things like the actions of different mouse buttons on window title bars and other areas of the user interface. Under the System section, there are options to control whether the system should become locked when power management blanks the screen and you can force Nautilus to always use the location entry bar rather than the path bar.

Some some of the janitor tools. It's amazing how often purging a cache can resolve a problem. As ever with Ubuntu Tweak, one begins to wonder if these features should be made standard in Ubuntu.

There are many other options, and despite the level of detail offered, the actual navigation between them is perfectly simple thanks to the arrangement of sections and subsections.

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Books Lens

Shawn Powers — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:01:56 +0000

by Shawn Powers

If you are an Ubuntu user and a fan of the new Unity interface, you might be interested in a new lens in development by David Callé. The Books Lens provides a real-time search interface for e-books. It currently interfaces with Google Books, Project Gutenberg and Forgotten Books. By the time you read this, that list probably will have grown.

The Books Lens instantly finds metadata on your search, including book covers, and gives you direct links to the books themselves. For us book nerds, it's quite a handy little tool. Check it out yourself at https://launchpad.net/unity-books-lens, or install the PPA with:


sudo apt-add-repository ppa:davidc3/books-lens

Then, install the package unity-books-lens.

This screenshot, from the project page, shows the search results for "Dora".

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The Post Penguicon Unity Unification Story

Shawn Powers — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

This past weekend, I was a "Nifty Guest" at Penguicon. Being a nifty guest is both an honor and a curse. On one hand, you get that fancy "NIFTY" on your name badge, but on the other hand you need to dance like a monkey whenever asked. Thankfully my dancing was held to a minimum this year.

I did a session on backing up, which I'll be posting as a video presentation here on our website later this week. I also got to have a battle to the death with Jorge Castro from Canonical about Ubuntu's new Unity interface.

I've known Jorge for a couple years, but I was surprised to learn that he was heavily involved in the transition to Unity. It made my disdain for the new interface a little awkward, but at the same time, who better to address my concerns?

I still don't really care for Unity, but I'll admit the panel was very helpful in my attempt to deal with it. Here are some highlights. Please note the questions and responses are based on my recollection of the panel, so I've taken some liberties. These should not be taken as quotes:

Shawn: I'm of the opinion that if something ain't broke, don't fix it. What was so inherently wrong with Ubuntu that a complete rewrite was required?

Jorge: While there were certainly some things wrong with Ubuntu, it wasn't because of some horrible failing that we decided to transition to Unity. As we've matured both as a company and a distribution, we have hired design and desktop experience people. We felt we'd be able to bring a new interface to users based on design-centric concepts and user testing feedback.

Unity has been designed from the ground up with accessibility, multitouch, and hardware acceleration in mind, which is great for OEM relationships. If our goal is to get more systems pre-installed with Linux, Unity will be a big step in that direction.

S: While there are plenty of things I don't like about Unity, there were also things I didn't like about the traditional Ubuntu desktop. The difference is that with the old desktop, I could tweak it to be something I liked. With Unity, we're forced to compute the "Ubuntu Way" with very little if any customization available.

J: Yeah, I wish we would have included at least a few simple customization options for Unity. Unfortunately, they just weren't quite ready and bug tested for release. The good news is there are some customizations that can be done, and in the future we'll see more and more things to change and customize. [NOTE: I'll have a link to those customization options at the end]

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When is a Gnome Not a Gnome? In Ubuntu 11.04!

Shawn Powers — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

At the Ubuntu Devloper Summit on Monday, it was announced that Ubuntu 11.04 will ship with Unity as its default shell. It will still focus on Gnome applications, and depend heavily on the Gnome libraries -- but the default interface will be Unity. For those unfamiliar with Unity, it's the default shell for the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu.

Does Canonical have the right to abandon the Gnome shell for their flagship product? Of course they do, it's their distribution. Heck, they kept it brown for years even when teased incessantly. Whether you love or hate the decision to move away from the Gnome shell in favor of Unity, it's Canonical's right to do as they see fit. Of course, it's easy to change the default shell, much like it's easy to change the default applications they install. To be frank, I dislike most of the default application choices in Ubuntu, yet the OS is so solid, I just tweak it a bit and I'm happy.

For browsing, I prefer Chromium over the default Firefox. I prefer Pidgin over Empathy. For music I like Banshee. For Twitter I install Twhirl. None of those tweaks cause problems with Ubuntu, and most integrate quite nicely even if they're not the default choices. So what does the switch to Unity mean for most users?

Not much.

Granted, it will be a little different to use, but most users shouldn't see much of a difference in functionality. There is some question as to whether Ubuntu can still call themselves a "Gnome-based Distribution", since they're really using Unity as their default user experience. That seems more an argument of semantics though, and won't matter much to the end user.

So what are your thoughts on the switch to Unity? Is it a good move? Bad move? Arrogant, power-flaunting, communist-loving, puppy-kicking move? Or do you not really care? Personally I fall in the latter camp. If I don't like Unity, I'll just install a different option. This is Linux after all, and we can do whatever we want!

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