[GRLUG] Ubuntu Oneiric

[Ben Rousch]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 11:20 PM, Mike Williams <knightperson at zuzax.com> wrote:
> OK, I'm really trying to be open-minded about it, but I'm not sure quite how
> much more I will let Oneiric Ocelot tempt me to fling my laptop across the
> room before I give up on it and go back to 10.10 or something! Even on this
> second attempt (my desktop ran Natty until recently), I am not getting along
> with Unity. I don't like the orange and gray color scheme, but it's the
> least annoying of the only four choices. I haven't found any way to install
> more themes, manually adjust the colors, adjust things like window border
> thickness, or add any shading. I can sort of understand the theory that it's
> the active pane of the interface that you should be most concerned about and
> the "chrome" should not distract from it, but this theory is taken way too
> far! I can hardly tell where one window ends and another begins when they're
> all the exact same shade boring gray.
>
> Unity is responsive enough most of the time, but occasionally it completely
> locks up for upwards of 20 seconds, which is just not acceptable. I still
> don't like the window manipulation gadgets being in the upper left, but I
> can accept that the Mac way is as sensible as the Windows way once I get
> used to it. However, I doubt that I'm ever going to agree with the designers
> that the menus should show up on the top of the screen regardless of where
> the active window is, and it's especially bad when they don't show up at all
> if the interface is in a bad mood. Said bad moods happen way too often.
> Having media player gadgets drop down from the speaker icon in the top bar
> is a decent idea, but when you click on them, they should be able to
> actually launch the program if it's not already up. Unless the player is an
> already open window, clicking the entry does absolutely nothing. Launching
> amarok often produces one of the 20-second lockups I mentioned, although I
> might be able to blame that on KDE versus Gnome issues or amarok itself.

Many of your gripes can be fixed by installing Gnome Shell. In Ubuntu
11.10 you can easily do this, and switch between Unity or Gnome Shell
at the login screen.

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
Reboot
Click the little gear thing next to your name at login, select Gnome

>
> And for my final gripe of the evening, it should not have taken me as long
> as it did (somewhere around two hours, I think) to figure out how to get ANY
> of the various media players to stream DLNA or DAAP from my media server /
> NAS box. None of them had it available at first, and there was no rhyme or
> reason to give me a hint where to go to activate the necessary plug-ins. It
> could be in the program's configuration menu, a tick-box in software center,
> or a completely random-sounding separate program to install, which may or
> may not even appear in the search if you don't tell it to display "hidden
> technical items".

Sorry, I have no idea what these are. All I can do is point you at
relevant-sounding Ask Ubuntu posts:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/1755/what-dlna-server-to-choose
http://askubuntu.com/questions/11147/setting-up-daap-in-banshee

>
> And one more thing (the above was going to be the final gripe until this
> message reached the bottom of the thunderbird window): when Unity is
> designed for laptops and netbooks, and thunderbird is the default mail
> client, under no circumstances should a window open up with part of it
> hanging below the physical screen. I about went nuts trying to add mail
> accounts to t-bird when I couldn't find the Add Account button because it
> was down below my keyboard. See, if there was a little bit of variety to the
> window borders I would have been able to more easily tell that that was what
> had happened! And I don't have all that small screen. If bad things like
> that happen on a 1280x800, what about 600-line netbooks???

I've found that under Unity this is usually caused by the window not
being maximized. Once you maximize the window, it fits correctly.

>
> Here ends the rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled
> conversation.
>
>
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-- 
 Ben Rousch
   brousch at gmail.com
   http://clusterbleep.net/

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