Tag Archives: desktop

e17 on Ubuntu

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Having looked at gOS recently, I decided that it was time to re-visit e17 myself on my Ubuntu system. I have used e17 in the past on Debian before I switched to Ubuntu.

There is a really cool script called easy_e17.sh that does all the work, and here is a how to that details the use of the script.

Now, I followed the steps, and have installed e17. The problem is that I don’t like it. I really want to, but it just does not look right when first installed. Although the themes are easy to install and change, they only affect the e17 elements. Gnome and GTK applications don’t look right.

With some effort it would be possible to match themes in e17, gnome, gtk etc., but I can’t be bothered. Am I getting lazy, or am I just not interested any more in fluff? Either way, it was a relief to get back into Gnome and all that Human consistency.

I will now just wait and see if anybody does a good Ubuntu derivative that has a fully configured e17 desktop. Failing that, I may keep e17 and whenever I am bored, chip away at the configuration until it feels right.

Compiz in Ubuntu 7.10

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One of the reasons that I wanted to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 before it was released was so that I could have a play with the new developments in compiz. It was therefore more than a little disappointing to discover that it did not work. When I tried to enable desktop effects, it would simply state that it could not, and would revert back to metacity.

At first, I was a little annoyed as I could not even see any error message as to why this had failed. Finally, for another reason, I started gnome-settings from the command line. When I then selected the appearance tool, and tried to turn on desktop effects, some useful information scrolled up the screen.

It would appear that by default, compiz checks that the graphics card has at least 64 MB or RAM before it will allow compiz to start. No doubt this is done for a good reason, but this does not help me with my 32 MB graphics card in my laptop.

A little bit of googling and I discover that compiz in Ubuntu has a wrapper script called /usr/bin/compiz A quick look in here and it is easy to see where the check for the RAM is done. I dropped the limit to 32 MB and tried again. Yay! Wobbly windows 🙂

Now all I need to do is find out how to configure compiz ….