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In Firefox 4, the old style status bar at the bottom was removed. Instead, the URL of a link is randomly displayed left or right in a small pop-up bobble. Annoying.
Luckily, a fix is already made: The Status-4-Evar extension. Download, install and the URL is back in the status bar as before.
I’m not the only one stalling on the new Gnome 3 / Shell UI, and looking for alternatives. Also, it seems I’m not the only one settling on Xfce as a replacement for Gnome 2. It’s a lightweight desktop, and strikingly similar to that of old Gnome and KDE. Basic panels, work spaces, window handling and customization is all in place.
To install after a plain Fedora install:
yum groupinstall XFCE
In Fedora 14, version 4.4 was available, while Fedora 15 includes the significant upgrade to Xfce 4.8. This caused a few problems, since I had already started switching in F14, and after upgrading, all my panels and launchers failed.
It was not to hard to transfer from the old Gnome 2 panels, though. Basic plug-in in the notification area was actually brought along fine, including parcellite, networking, and even Dropbox. For the “drawers” in Gnome, Xfce uses “launchers”. It’s the same idea. And what’s more, the 4.8 version also uses the .desktop short-cut files. To copy from a Gnome 2 “panel / drawer” to a Xfce launcher, provided one already exists (It might not work 100%, but you get the idea):
grep -r -l panel_3 $HOME/.gconf/apps/panel | xargs grep stringvalue | grep desktop | tr '<' '>' | cut -f 3 -d '>' | while read f; do d=`locate -n 1 $f`; cp $d $HOME/.config/xfce4/panel/launcher-11.; done
You might also want to style and theme the look a bit, including the buttons on the windows. I set the Window Manager Theme to “Stoneage”, and increased the title font to 11. Under Settings -> Appearance, I’ve gone for “ClearlooksClassic”, “Fedora” icons, and 14 as default font (since I sit far away from the screen).
Under Window Manager Tweaks I was first confused by the “wrap workspaces” options. However, they seem to have been cancelled out by Xinerama or something else.
The default taskbar clock does not have a calendar, so go for the “Orange Clock” instead. I replaced the visible line with “%H:%M”, and the tooltip with “%a %d %b %Y/%V”.
And that’s all there is to it, really. Xfce does not have many “native” application, but all GTK+ based ones run fine, include what I’ve tried from Gnome and KDE: gThumb, K3b, and Gnome Terminal.
After the latest upgrade to Fedora 15, Firefox 5, and Gnome 3 (more about that in later posts), there are several annoying features to remove and customize. One common theme creping in again and again is animated windows, tabs and the like. It adds nothing be distractions. Luckily, it can be configured:
In Firefox 4 and later, type in about:config in the URL bar. Search for browser.tabs.animate on the filter line, and switch that setting to off.
Thanks to the Firefox Support Site for this tip.
The “Real Names” discussion is raging these days, and it’s great to see not only fringe opinionist chipping in, but big names on both sides. Danah Boyd from Microsoft chooses to focus on the power people ought to have to secure themselves. While Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, looks at pseudonyms and how they can be used to avoid persisting and attaching information to one’s real identity. The Slashdot crowd says, “if you don’t like it, don’t use their service”. Everybody has a story from Facebook when sensitive information leaked out to the wrong people.
All this starts to sound familiar, and indeed the various points raised now were all neatly collected about two years ago in Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“. Schonberger’s argument was not focused on real name or pseudonyms, but rather examined what happens when the default shifts from forgetting to remembering almost everything. He investigates several options and solutions to the problem of eternal memory, and has at least one suggestion which might help: expiration dates for information.
Although engineers and managers alike would get much back from reading the book, I fear that Schonberger’s argument would be lost on many of them. It would drown in technical details and resistance, never making it into code. Expiring digital information is so counter-intuitive to how engineers work and think, it would be written off as impossible.
As for the “Real Names” debate, my take is “trust no one”. “Enemy of the State” is definitely worth a re-watch if you haven’t seen it lately.
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