[ale] Greetings Carbon Units!

[Scott Castaline]

On 05/05/2011 11:01 AM, Scott Castaline wrote:
> I had tested the Live Alpha F15 version for the ATI video test. I have 
> the HD 5770 video card so Gnome3 shell did work fine. It is very 
> different in that the desktop icons that we may have all been familiar 
> with are no longer there. The menu system changed in that instead of a 
> drop down menu it displays all apps in that category as icons spread 
> out through your desktop. It takes a little getting used to but it is 
> pretty simple to figure out the workings of it once you play with it. 
> I have recently installed the Beta version as a VM using Fedora's/Red 
> Hat KVM which does not provide video capable of dealing with the 
> Gnome3 Shell so it uses the Fall Back Gnome3 Desktop which seems to be 
> a cross between the more familiar Gnome Desktop in an updated form and 
> the Gnome3 Shell.
>
> I'm not sure if I like either one yet, but I think I could very well 
> adapt to it and you youngsters out there will probably take to it 
> quickly and may even like it right away. That is just my initial 
> impression of the 2 versions and have not gone to in depth  of my 
> experimentation yet. I do plan on setting up a dual boot setup with 
> F14 and F15 Beta, temporarily to see how it interacts with my media 
> and data from the F14 system. So far though it has not crash & burned 
> like some early versions of other OSs, and there are definitely some 
> neat enhancements on F15 that I need to explore some more.
>
> As far as Ubuntu goes, I stopped being an Ubuntu fan sometime back, 
> but with all of the recent scuttlebutt about the new UI I may try it 
> on a VM just to get somewhat an idea what it's all about.
Finally got around to installing F15 Beta. Had issues with Brasero 
making lovely coffee mug coasters, finally broke down and installed k3b 
and got a bootable DVD. I used a spare drive disconnecting my usual 4 
drives with F14. Not ready to install as a dual boot yet.

As I stated with the Alpha version Gnome 3 Shell is very different and 
really takes some getting used to. Learn keyboard shortcuts as quickly 
as you can, I found it tedious switching windows and such by mouse. That 
funny little M$ logo button has a function in that it switches to 
thumbnail view of all open windows on the desktop instead of clicking on 
"Activities" label on top left. Also out of the box the windows only 
have the x button no minimize or maximize buttons. A handy utility to 
install right away is gnome-tweak-tool. Running that and you'll be able 
to restore either the min & close or max & close buttons, but you can't 
have all 3. It does a couple of other things as well, such as the clock. 
Out of the box it is in the center and only displays the day of the week 
and time with no seconds. I found that info that indicates that the 
shell is written in JAVA so those of you into JAVA scripting there is 
supposed to be a lot you can do to it.

The down side from what I've seen is that it still is in limbo so any 
updates to the shell may very likely break anything that you've done to 
it. I did find some blog entries by a Finnbarr P. Murphy that breaks 
things down a bit at least for me. I was able to change the clock 
display based on one of his posts. My clock now displays the date with 
day of week (Wed. May 18, 2011) as well as displaying the seconds. Also 
the GUI for gnome-tweak-tool also has the ability to do the same.

The background out of the box is essentially what is used from upstream 
and leaves a lot to be desired. I was able to change it to my usual 
background of the Enterprise from STXI. It really stretches the image 
both horizontally and vertically such that the ship fills the whole 
screen and the text Star Trek 05.08.09 in the upper right corner is no 
longer visible. The image does not look distorted so I don't care.

I have not found a way to change the theme yet or the icon sizes yet. I 
find the windows are bulkier than I'm used to and seems to require more 
real estate. There are some options in the accessibility menu that makes 
things a lot easier to see for old farts like me, and they seem to be 
integrated a little better not as an apparent after thought thrown in. 
Still have more playing around and reading to do, so I'm still not sure 
if I like it or not. It seems to be a sore issue on the Fedora Forum, 
not a lot of people like it and seems a lot hate it as is.

Printing also seems to be an issue at least with HP printers. The HP 
setup app is broken, the utility that is on the applications icon list 
doesn't work either. It seemed that you have to use CUPs via web 
browser, which didn't work for me either. I did install 
system-config-printer and ran that and was finally able to get my 
printer configured. At first it seemed to work, but then I moved onto 
playing around with different scanner software (I have the Officejet 
6500 E710n-z Multi-function). Later I went to print something and found 
that all the coloring was way off. The only way that I can explain it is 
that it reminded me of a bad acid trip from the 60's. So something else 
to play with. It seems to work fine with my wife's laptop and F14 so 
there must be something broken in F15, well it is Beta.

Stay tuned for future episodes of F15 adventures or just suck down some 
bad acid, groovy man!