A look at Gnome 3.12

I would have liked to have an in depth look at Gnome 3.12, but unfortunately the Live CD I tried kept causing kernel panics every time I tried to launch an application. Here are a couple of screenshots I was able to take:

What I can say about it is that it looks beautiful, by which I mean the GUI of Gnome applications, the theme, the icons and the desktop, and it looks contemporary- of the 21st century rather than the 20th.

The Activities overview seems to open quickly. I tried an install of Gnome 3 recently in Fedora and found that there was a significant lag in opening the  Activities overview, admittedly on a now-quite-old laptop. I hope this is due to improvements in the compositing engine that might make Gnome more usable for me.

I've seen several people who wrote that they hated Gnome 3 say now that they use it and love it, so I suppose it's a bit ironic that I said I loved it from the start but don't now actually use it. Apart from the performance issue, another issue for me is non-Gnome applications. For example, I use Liferea a lot, but its notifications don't work natively with Gnome and look terrible; in XFCE however, it's fine.

Gnome 3.12 is in Debian Testing. I am tempted to try installing it, because it looks so good, and to see if any of my problems with Gnome 3 have gone, but my current installation of XFCE on Debian Testing is just so usable and stable that I'm reluctant to wipe it.

Welcome to GNOME 3.12

Gnome 3.12 is out. You can try it out here. Somebody has already done so and posted a video (with a great soundtrack) here. I'll be doing so myself soon.

XFCE annoyances

XFCE is a great Linux desktop and ideal for replacing Windows XP on older computers (security updates are of course gong to end for XP next year, so there's no time like the present for trying Linux on XP machines). I've been using it for about six months on this 2005 laptop, as well as on a 2003 laptop. XFCE is noticeably less taxing on the more modern laptop than Gnome 3.10, which I tried recently in the Fedora 20 beta, especially when switching quickly between different applications.

XFCE shares the same desktop paradigm as Windows XP (panel, menus, window buttons etc), so it's an easy switch to make, except for a few annoyances which may put off new users. I'm going to detail theses annoyances and how to get round them here.

Problem panels

After installing XFCE and logging in to your account, you are prompted to set up a panel. However, if you don't save the session after logging off, the next time you log on, you will not see any panels. You can get them back by right clicking on the desktop and going to Applications>Settings>Panel. However, you may see a popup window with the following error message as described on the Arch Linux forum:

The panel cannot be edited while running in kiosk mode.

Solution: Drop out of XFCE with Ctrl + Alt + F1, navigated to ~/.cache/sessions/ and delete the contents with the following command:

rm -rf *

Restart, log in to XFCE, set up panels as required and save the session on exit to see your panels appear at next log on.

Unwanted saved sessions

Having saved your session to save your panels, you may decide that you don't want to have every application you had open at shutdown reappear when you next log on. The solution to this is to close all applications, log off saving the minimal session, log back on and disable saved sessions.

However, you may be puzzled to find that applications are still reopening at logon.

Solution: be aware that only the logout GUI respects the preference to not save sessions. (See this post on the XFCE forum.) The Action Buttons panel plugin seems to use a shutdown method that does not respect session preferences, so if you're wondering why applications autostart when you've chosen not to autosave sessions, Action Buttons may be the culprit.

Debian Sources List Generator

Ever wondered what your sources should be in Debian? Debian Sources List Generator will generate a sources list for you.

Firefox's new look

Firefox's new look (the Australis GUI) can now be seen in the Firefox Nightly build. Without more ado, here it is, on Debian XFCE:

A lot of negative opinion on the internet, but quite like it myself, no objections certainly, and tabs definitely look nicer.

Firefox Nightly can be unpacked to the home directory and run from there. However, it's probably a good idea to use a separate profile, to avoid the risk of making changes to an existing profile that are not compatible with the existing version of Firefox (or Iceweasel, in my case).

Debian Bits And Snips explains how to do this. I ran into a problem in that when I'd closed Firefox Nightly and launched Iceweasel again, it was using the new profile. I had to use Profile Manager again to switch Iceweasel back to the default profile, but after that I used the launch command given and Firefox Nightly used its own profile and left Iceweasel using the default profile.

/home/username/firefox/firefox -P "new profile" -no-remote

no-remote means Firefox uses the new profile independently of the profile set for Iceweasel and without changing the profile set for Iceweasel- indeed it can run at the same time as Iceweasel with this command.

Profile manager can be launched with the following terminal command in Linux, if Iceweasel is using the wrong profile:

firefox --ProfileManager

Open magnet links in Transmission

One way to do this is to copy the link and open it as an URL in Transmission, but I recently came across some instructions for making magnet links clickable and open in Transmission.

Instructions are at transmissionbt.com.

After that, make sure Transmission is set to handle magnet links in the Iceweasel Content type menu, as described on the Crunchbang forum.

Browse files on Android from Thunar

If you try to browse an Android device from Thunar in XFCE over Bluetooth, it will try to launch Nautilus, which of course isn't installed in XFCE.

The Arch Linux Wiki has a useful script to allow Thunar to browse files on Android over Bluetooth. The script uses obexftp, which must be installed.

obexftp must also be installed in Android. I've read that some Android devices have the service running, but mine didn't.

Bluetooth File Transfer and ES File Explorer File Manager both install the service.

To be honest, I didn't have much success browsing files. In particular, image files from the phone's camera took a long time to browse, and half way through the folder, Thunar would give the same thumbnail to every file.

But I thought I'd document what I did in case I need to come back to it, or in case somebody else finds it useful.