Sunday, May 22, 2011

Uncle Jimmy Has Been Rapturized


Uncle Jimmy is gone but I'm still here. The Rapture has taken my righteous Uncle Jimmy. He was here for the picnic, but disappeared sometime between the hot-dogs and Aunt Mabel's apple pie.
He was considered to be a religious man, despite his gambling problem. He owed a bookie named Big Al quite a lot of money.
He will be missed by us Left Behind individuals. Of course he will miss the new Harry Potter movie and would have liked the new health care plan because Uncle Jimmy kept falling out of trees and off of roofs, he was always breaking his legs.
If Jimmy were still around he might have ended up in some local land fill or rolled into a shallow grave in desert sands with his dead smiling intimidating pale face crushed in by large rock thrown from a huge man named Mucowsky alias Moose. His body raised and resurrected by hungry mange infested coyotes. His callus encrusted well gnawed thigh bone, later to be found by a sheep herder and hung above his camper wagon door as an example to the sheep to not stray too far from the flock.
Yes Uncle Jimmy was taken by the Rapture on May 21, 2011.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Ubuntu Unity is Poo Poo


Unity is Comiconical's new graphical interface replacing Gnome 2.3, sort of. When I first opened it up (defaulted to 640x480) I thought that I was looking at Windows 3.0. After fixing the video size. It still was weird looking. Some goofy dock on the left ( I love my desk-top clean) and window controls in the upper left status bar. The dock was loaded with LibreOffice and a couple of other items. I quickly figured out how to change the dock items to what I wanted using the the plus thingy in the dock. I'm not too impressed with it, giving me some ideas of new programs to install and hunting for my programs to run.
None of my Compiz settings worked, I love to use cube with horizontal work spaces. What I got was a workspace icon in the dock. Activating cube broke Unity.
I also like a status bar at the bottom so I can quickly tell what windows are open not the little white arrows in the dock. While using Firefox sometimes a pop-up window gets past the blocker showing in the status bar. In Unity you have no idea that it is even there.
As for the window controls being in the top left bar, what are they thinking! Go to Compiz and check “Windows Decorations” that might help.
I lost my weather applet in the top bar which gave me nearly instant outside temperature and clicking gave me a satellite image of rain or snow. There is supposed to be a weather applet for Unity but it wasn't in my current repository.
Also it was pointed out that Firefox and Blender Render do not work together, yep, it's true.

Firefox 4 was installed by default, it is fast and I like it, but I had already previously installed it.
Banshee music player was installed, it might be a little better than Rhythmbox, I don't use it much anyway, except for Last-FM and none of them seem to work now anyway. I prefer a small Audacious player.
LibreOffice is a good replacement for Open Office it's very similar and should be better supported with new updates.
There are ways to get the cube in Unity, for now it is a Hacker's Hassle. When I broke Unity with Compiz. I decided to log in to Ubuntu Classic. It was the same great Ubuntu as I'm used to, with great updates and Gnome 2.3. I was about ready to go to LinuxMint as it is using Gnome 2.3 in its new soon to be released distro. For now Ubuntu Classic will suffice. The future of Gnome 2.3 could be bad because Gnome has decided to end its 2.3 version. Gnome 3.0 is just as goofy as Unity with the stupid dock on the left. If I wanted a dock I would have added Docky or Awn. What GUI will be used in the future is a mystery to me and many others.
In the final, I'm sure Apple users really like the new Unity and Comiconical has the solution.