TOPIC: GOS
Fixing Background Image Display in GNOME Shell 3.10
2nd May 2014On upgrading from Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 to Ubuntu GNOME 14.04, a few rough edges were to be noticed. One was the display of my chosen background image: it was garbled. Later, I discovered that there is a maximum width of 2560 px for background images in GNOME Shell these days and that things get messy beyond that.
In my case, the image width was around 6000 px, and I was used to it getting resized in GNOME Shell 3.8 and its predecessors. It appears that the functionality got removed after that though, so the workaround of manual image resizing in the GIMP needed to be employed. Though having big images open in memory creates an additional overhead, not handling them very well at all looks like a bug caused by setting 2560 px as a maximum screen width for the GNOME Shell panel and the complete removal of Nautilus from desktop rendering duties. Let's hope that sense is seen with ever larger screen sizes and resolutions coming our way.
It's the sort of thing that did get me looking at adding on Cinnamon 2.2 for a while before setting background image scaling using the indispensable GNOME Tweak Tool was discovered. LinuxG.net has a useful tutorial on this for anyone with such an adventurous streak in them. For now though, I am OK with my set-up but the GNOME project's focus on minimalism could affect us in other ways, so I can see why Clem Lefebvre started the Cinnamon one primarily for Linux Mint and the desktop environment is appearing elsewhere too. After all, Gedit lost its menu bar in GNOME 3.12 so it's just as well that we have alternatives.
Update 2014-05-06: It appears that the desktop image bug that afflicts GNOME Shell 3.10 got sorted for GNOME Shell 3.12. At least, that is the impression that an Antergos instance in a VirtualBox virtual machine gives me.
A little more freedom
10th December 2011A few weeks ago, I decided to address the fact that my Toshiba laptop have next to useless battery life. The arrival of an issue of PC Pro that included a review of lower cost laptops was another spur for looking on the web to see what was in stock at nearby chain stores. In the end, I plumped for an HP Pavilion dm4 from a branch of Argos. In fact, they seem to have a wider range of laptops than PC World!
The Pavilion dm4 seems to come in two editions and I opted for the heavier of these, though it still is lighter than my Toshiba Equium as I found on a recent trip away from home. Its battery life is a revelation for someone who never has got anything better than three hours from a netbook. Having more than five hours certainly makes it suitable for those longer train journeys away from home, and I have seen remaining battery life being quoted as exceeding seven hours from time to time, though I wouldn't depend on that.
Of course, having longer battery life would be pointless if the machine didn't do what else was asked of it. It comes with the 64-bit of Windows 7 and this taught me that this edition of the operating system also runs 32-bit software, a reassuring discovering. There's a trial version of Office 2010 on there too and, having a licence key for the Home and Student edition, I fully activated it. Otherwise, I added a few extras to make myself at home, such as Dropbox and VirtuaWin (for virtual desktops as I would in Linux). While I was playing with the idea of adding Ubuntu using Wubi, I am not planning to set up dual booting of Windows and Linux like I have on the Toshiba. Little developments like this can wait.
Regarding the hardware, the CPU is an Intel Core i3 affair and there's 4 MB of memory on board. The 14" screen makes for a more compact machine without making it too diminutive. The keyboard is of the scrabble-key variety and works well too, as does the trackpad. There's a fingerprint scanner for logging in and out without using a password, but I haven't got to check how this works so far. It all zips along without any delays, and that's all that anyone can ask of a computer.
There is one eccentricity in my eyes though: it appears that the functions need to be used in combination with the Fn key for them to work like they would on a desktop machine. That makes functions like changing the brightness of the screen, adjusting the sound of the speakers and turning the Wi-Fi on and off more accessible. My Asus Eee PC netbook and the Toshiba Equium both have things the other way around, so I found this set of affairs unusual, but it's just a point to remember rather than being a nuisance.
Though HP may have had its wobbles regarding its future in the PC making business, the Pavilion feels well put together and very solidly built. The premium paid over the others on my shortlist seems to have been worth it. If HP does go down the premium laptop route as has been reported recently, this is the kind of quality that they would need to deliver to just higher prices. Saying that, is this the time to do such a thing with other devices challenging the PC's place in consumer computing? It would be a shame to lose the likes of the Pavilion dm4 from the market to an act of folly.
Rough?
11th November 2009Was it because Canonical and friends kept Ubuntu in such a decent state from 8.04 through to 9.04 that things went a little quiet in the blogosphere on the subject of the well-known Linux distribution? If so, 9.10 might be proving more of a talking point, and you have to wonder if this is such a good thing with the appearance of Windows 7 on the scene. Looking on the bright side, 10.04 will be an LTS release, so there is some chance that any rough edges that are on display now could be resolved by next April. Even so, it might have been better not to see anything so obvious at all.
In truth, Ubuntu always has had its gaps, and I have seen a few of their ilk over the last two years. Of these, a few have triggered postings on here. In fact, issues with accessing the BBC iPlayer still bring a goodly number of folk to this website. That may just be a matter of grabbing RealPlayer, now helpfully available as a DEB package, from the requisite place on the web and ensuring that Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras is in place too, but you have to know that in the first place.
Even so, unexpected behaviours like Palimpsest seeing every partition on a disk as a different drive and SIL Raid mappings being seen for hard drives that used to live on the main home PC that bit the dust earlier this year; it only happens on one of the machines that I have running Ubuntu so it may be hardware thing and newly added hard drive uses none of the SIL mapping either.
Perhaps more seriously (is it something that a new user should be encountering?), a misfiring variant of Brasero had me moving to K3b. Then, UFRaw was sluggish in batch mode, yet that's nothing that having a Debian VM won't overcome. Rough edges like these do get you asking if 9.10 was ready for the big time, while making you reluctant to recommend it to mainstream users like my brother.
The counterpoint to the above is that 9.10 includes a host of under the bonnet changes like the introduction of Ext4 hard drive formatting, Xsplash to allow the faster system loading to occur unseen and GNOME 2.28. To someone looking in from outside like me, that looks like a lot of work and might explain the ingress of the annoyances that I have seen. Add to that the fact that we are between Debian releases, so things like the optimised packaging of ImageMagick or UFRaw may not be so high up the list of the things to do, especially with the more general speed optimisations that were put in place for 9.10.
With 10.04 set to be an LTS release, I'd be hoping that consolidation is the order of the day over the next five or six months, but it seems to be the inclusion of new features and other such progress that get magazine reviewers giving higher ratings (Linux Format has given it a mark of 9 out of 10). With the mooted inclusion of GNOME 3 and its dramatically different interface in 10.10, they should get their fill of that. However, I'd like to see some restraint for the take of a smooth transition from the familiar GNOME 2.x to the new. If GNOME 3 stays very like its alpha builds, then the question of how users will take to it arises. Of course, there's still some time before we see GNOME 3 and, having seen how the Ubuntu developers transformed GNOME 2.28, I wouldn't be surprised if the impact of any change could be dulled.
In summary, my few weeks with Ubuntu 9.10 as my main OS have thrown up no major roadblocks that would cause me to look at moving elsewhere; Fedora would be tempting if that situation were to arise. The irritations that I have seen are more like signs of a lack of polish and remain peripheral to day-to-day working if you discount CD/DVD burning. To be honest, there always have been some element of roughness on Ubuntu, but has the lack of sizeable change spoilt us? Whatever about how things feel afterwards, significant changes can mean new problems to resolve and inspire blog posts describing any solutions, so it's not all bad. If that's what Canonical wants to see, they might get it, and the year ahead looks as if it will be an interesting one after a recent quieter period.