It is finally easy as pie to edit many colour aspects of the GNOME desktop environment. In the past you had to create a file called .gtkrc-2.0 with your colour choices and place it in your home folder. Granted, it was damn easy and not really rocket science, but I always wished for a simple application with an eye dropper to allow for easy colour choice.

Well with the the GNOME 2.22 finally we have a simple little appilication called gnome-color-chooser which you can find in synaptic. This allows you to change many different aspects as this screenshot shows:

Today is a good day, not only did I install the new release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, but I did this on my MacBook.

I followed this tutorial, however there are a few things to note (the below points refer to the tutorial):

Of the Basic Instructions, at point 4:

I used the Disk Utility on the OS X installation CD to create a new partition for Ubuntu. I am not sure if this utility is referred to as Boot Camp. Don’t format the partition using Disk Utility.

This is an important step, the Ubuntu install script will not be able to read the hfs+ formatted OS X partition, hence you will not able to use it to create a partition for Ubuntu. This is why you need to use the Disk Utility which is on your OS X installation CD.

…and point 6:

During the installation of Ubuntu 8.04 I used the built in partitioner to manually edit the (unformatted) partition I had made earlier with the Disk Utility. I created a 4GB swap partition and a 30GB partition for Ubuntu formatted with Ext3. I did not delete any existing partitions.

…and point 8:

Once you have restarted after installing Ubuntu on your MacBook, you will see the rEFIt window (assuming you installed rEFIt, which I advise you to do) with a choice between launching OS X or Ubuntu, if you choose Ubuntu and are taken to a black screen with the following message:

No Bootable Device — insert boot disk and press any key

…then it means rEFIt is out of sync. In order to resync it, simply choose ‘partition tool’ at the rEFIt screen and say yes when rEFIt asks if it should update the MBR.

You will then be able to log into Ubuntu on your MacBook.

For Wireless Setup:

The following is depreciated, you can safely ignore it:

sudo ndiswrapper -m

Good luck with installing Ubuntu on your MacBook!

To give you some background info, about two years ago I switched from Windows to Ubuntu and never looked back.

At the start of this year, I enrolled in a Media Arts course, included in the tuition fees is a MacBook. I received it about a week and a half ago and have been using it ever since.

Here are some of my observations and impressions so far.

Appearance:
Shiny, polished and elegant. I am using default themes and styles, yet I am impressed by the quality of artwork. The entire operating system has a very nice polished look and feel to it. One can tell that a lot of thought has gone into the layout and design.

Ubuntu, despite being much easier to customise than OS X, is a step behind in terms of default theme layout and design. It lacks some of the polish. Of course this is also a matter of opinion, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Quitting Applications:
For the first couple of days I had a hard time getting used to the fact that, in order to quit an application, you must navigate to the application menu and select quit from there. Clicking on the ‘x’ in a window will not do it.

I am still not quite sure what the reasoning is behind this, and I do feel that in stark contrast to many other usability aspects, this is counter-intuitive, but I have gotten used to it now.

Integration:
This is something I really admire in OS X Leopard. Everything is tied together; settings, configurations and options. It saves time and avoids redundancy.

Application Diversity
Here Ubuntu wins hands down. To be fair, the package of applications that is included in each of these operating systems is affected by the nature of the usage licence.

Ubuntu is free and open source, as such it includes, from the start, just about all applications you might need; office suite, multi-protocol messenger, good dvd/cd burning applications, good image manipulation applications, various multi-codec video and audio applications.

OS X Leopard on the other hand, being a proprietary product, comes with basic applications. Given the nature of Apple, they of course want you to buy their more enhanced applications such as office suites etc.., hence one needs to hunt down and install various applications, such as Adium or NeoOffice to be truly productive.

Stability:
So far OS X has been very stable. I have not experienced any system crashes. I did experience the Mail application quitting unexpectedly while I was trying to import my emails from Evolution, I was however able to circumvent this annoyance by breaking my emails into 3-4 smaller packages.

I am also a little annoyed by the display errors that I noticed while using Adobe Flash. I am not sure if this is due to Flash or OS X. Sometimes menus will not update until you move your mouse over them. This comes as somewhat of a surprise for a product that caters to designers and artists.

Hardware Design:
The design of the MacBook is very impressive. The features I like most are the MagSafe power connector, which is magnetic, and therefore attaches to the power plug by itself once brought close. The status leds on the battery which light up to inform you how much juice is left in your battery without the need to have the laptop running (i.e. you do not need to launch your operating system to see the battery status).

Conclusion:
Overall the MacBook and OS X Leopard have been a pleasant surprise. Windows had greatly damaged my opinion of proprietary software and operating systems. Apple has improved this image, although as far as I am concerned, free and open source software, while perhaps not looking sexiest, will always be one step ahead in terms of flexibility, development speed and security.

I am looking forward to see how well the upcoming Ubuntu release will fair on the MacBook, stay tuned for a report on that.

Users of the GNOME desktop environment may have noticed that there has been a long standing request to allow for different wallpapers on each workspace. Judging by the age of this request, 2001, and the fact that it has yet to be implemented, it is evidently not a priority for GNOME developers.

Many of us find this attitude most unfortunate, yet it seems that there are efforts by individuals to achieve such functionality.

One such project is called Wallpapoz, a one man show.

From the project website:

Wallpapoz application enables you to configure Gnome desktop wallpapers in unique way. You could have Gnome desktop wallpaper changes when the specified time has passed. The most important feature is you could have Gnome desktop wallpaper changes when you change workspace.

I recently tested Wallpapoz, it installed without any problems in Gutsy Gibbon and it does work. Unfortunately there is a downside. It takes between one and three seconds for the wallpaper image to change when you switch workspaces.

As of writing this article, Wallpapoz is written in Python, so to install it:

sudo python setup.py install

and to uninstall it:

sudo python setup.py uninstall

Today I needed to make some simple flowcharts to mirror our invoicing path in the office. I set out to do this using PowerPoint, yet I quickly realised that this was not the right tool for the job. It was time consuming and not very user-friendly. Options and features were hidden in various menus, and it took time to find them, test them and then use them. To be fair, I do not think that PowerPoint is the right tool for such a task.

Microsoft Visio would be more applicable, but we do not have it in the office.

A helpful member over at ubuntuforums.org mentioned Dia, a free and cross-platform tool with which you can make diagrams and flowcharts. From the project website:

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

I thought I would give it a try. A Windows installer was included which installed without any problems on my Windows 2000 machine. With around 12MB file size, Dia is a relatively small application and so the installation was quite fast.

Dia is intuitive and very easy to use. Even someone like me, who does not need and therefore does not use PowerPoint or Visio, would have no trouble understanding the tools in Dia.

One thing does require getting used to however, the workspace you see in Dia is relative. In other words, while you do see dark blue solid outlines which highlight an A4 page for example, Dia while scale your work if you go beyond these outlines. If you try out Dia you will see what I mean. Make a box and fill it with text then print it out, it will be huge. Now add more boxes (especially horizontally) and you will notice that the boxes will be scaled to fit one page (if you choose to have them printed like this) or more pages.

I found this to be a rather good feature, I did not have to worry about spacing or alignment and could focus on the content.

A screenshot of Dia in action:

Dia gets a thumbs up from me, stable, functional and promising.