Making GNOME more Usable

And while I am at it, some hints on getting GNOME a small little bit more usable. The problem is mostly the default window manager, and the gripes I'm having with it are basically the same that Linus Torvalds had some years ago. I want my window buttons to be configurable. To be more precise, I want the "maximize" button to behave like in almost every other window manager: 3 different mouse buttons, 3 different button actions: "maximize", "maximize horizontally", "maximize vertically".
Linus' problems have been addressed, and I'm explaining a lame workaround for my wishes to get something slightly similar to what I want. My workaround does only work because of the fixes for Linus' problems.

After looking into the code I understood that the window buttons are only used with left-click, right and middle click are handled by the "window titlebar action" instead.

So I redefined the window titlebar mouse actions to do maximize horizontally / vertically on right click and double click. (I am pretty accustomed to having middle button on title bar put the window into the background, but I might change that).

So here's what you have to do.

• open regedit.exe gconf-editor


• browse to /apps/metacity/general


• change action_double_click_titlebar to toggle_maximize_vertically


• change action_right_click_titlebar to toggle_maximize_horizontally

While you are at it, you might also enable resize_with_right_button, which restores even some more sanity.

For all those asking why I'm not using a different window manager with GNOME: been there, tried that, but the integration of them all was pretty horrible (keyboard shortcuts no longer easily configurable, ...) and I want somehting that just works and does not always get in my way. If I wanted that, I could have kept KDE.

plasmoid-networkmanagement - How to connect?

After Will's talk about new KDE Features for 11.4 on the openSUSE Conference, I thought I'd finally give the networkmanagement plasmoid a try and installed it.
While it looks neat and apparently would show additional information about my connection (compared to knetworkmanager), I was unable to find a button or other UI element that would allow me to connect to a 3G Network.

Has anyone managed to use this for connecting? How?

I was just lucky that I had nm-applet installed, otherwise I would not even have had a way to get online at all... :-)

PAN/NAP made even easier...

I wrote last year about how to use bluetooth networking to connect to the internet via a mobile phone. Since then, I had heard rumours that NetworkManager was now able to do this as well, but I actually never managed to find out how to do that (admittedly, I never looked too hard).
Today I checked again.
Since those are the "reference implementations", I started GNOME's nm-applet and bluetooth-applet instead of knetworkmanager and kbluetooth. I still could not find anything related to bluetooth in nm-applet's UI. Then I looked a bit farther and found Dan Williams' post about it.
Long story short: I deleted my phone from bluetooth-applet's "known hosts" and re-paired it again. There it asked me if I want to access the internet via my mobile phone, which I confirmed. After that, nm-applet has now an entry for "PANU" which is the Phone's connection.
Working well and pretty cool, too. One more workaround that's not needed anymore.

For completeness, I also tried to remove and pair the phone with kbluetooth, but apart from it not working at all (never asking for a PIN), it also did not ask for the internet connection stuff. So for now, if you want Bluetooth networking, just use nm-applet and bluetooth-applet.

$HOME full? WTF?

Today I discovered that my $HOME was nearly full. My machine has only moderate space for the encrypted /home partition, but there were almost 2GB free until a few days ago, so I decided to look where the space went.

It was easy: ~/.xsession-errors was over 1,5GB. I looked who was wanting to tell me lots of important stuff and found out that about every KDE4 program produced several debug lines, almost every second.
Since I doubt that anybody will ever want to look at 1,5GB logfiles, I just decided to redirect it to /dev/null in /usr/bin/startkde. Now only my submitrequest number 30607 needs to be accepted into KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop, so that everyone benefits from this solution.

Note: it took 15 days for the logfile to get that big, but to be honest: I don't want to reboot every two weeks, only to keep KDE4 from crapping my home directory.
Second Note: If there had been any significant updates in FACTORY in the last two months, I would probably not even have noticed the problem, but there were none ;)

More KDE4 rants

Seeing that I apparently hit a nerve for some people with my last post, here is the next thing that really annoys me every day in KDE4.

Notifications.

Those ugly passive pop-ups that appear on the display near the area where you have configured the "system tray" to be on the panels. From the beginning they were an example of uglyness. After quite some time they at least stopped to be drawn one over the other, so they are no longer totally unusable, but they still are not pretty.
One example: most of them are too small, so that the text they should show me gets cut off and I have to guess what the system wants to tell me.

As much as I detest GNOME, their unobtrusive notifications in the lower right corner are much more stylish and less disturbing than the KDE4 ones.

And it is not QT's fault: a proprietary application like skype, using QT, can do it in almost the same way as GNOME, so it is definitely possible.

Programs using the root window considered obsolete in KDE4

See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219249. Unfortunately this means that my wife and kids will not get upgraded to KDE4 once I'll replace their 11.0 installations but will probably get GNOME instead. Because no xsnow (for my wife) and no xpenguins (for my kids) - that's just not an option.