What do I want out of my linux desktop?

1. Full access to any KDE and Gnome applications I need
2. Ability to devote 100% of my real estate to what I’m working on
3. Keyboard shortcuts for every common task
4. Fast access to multiple workspaces
5. Quick access to system monitors, date and time (and perhaps rss, weather…)
6. Prettiness 😛

Fluxbox has delivered this functionality with great efficiency. That’s a mixed blessing – I haven’t had a need to shop around, so I’m not sure if there’s something I’m missing out on. Certainly compiz-fusion will be a blast to play with some day, albeit not (yet) necessary. A lot of my linux friends have defected to Macs, but that’s too rich for my blood. Go ahead and rant at me if you’re from another desktop planet. I’m eternally curious.

I’m using the following with fluxbox to keep me happy:

• YAX theme
• slit apps: gkrellm, wmsmixer, wmtop, wmweather+ (replace this!)
• a tricky fluxbox keyboard macro to allow me to pop up the “slit” sidebar – I believe you need fluxbox 1.1.1 or better to do this:

  # MDM Key to toggle autohide of slit.  Pop it!
  None F10 :ToggleCmd {MacroCmd {SetResourceValue session.screen0.slit.autoHide false} {Reconfigure}} {MacroCmd {SetResourceValue session.screen0.slit.autoHide true} {Reconfigure}}
  

• conky; really sweet looking, but sits on the desktop, which I hardly ever see; I keep it simple (date, time, machine name)
• and of course, a custom background and customized keys, menu and startup config files

UPDATE: I got Hua to play with compiz-fusion on his new laptop, so I could live vicariously. 3D cubes with windows hovered by z-order, cylinders, flipping windows stuck back-to-back… now I’m burning with desire. But it sounds like I won’t be able to use fluxbox with it, so I’ll have to save that project for a rainy day for now…

Here’s the path I want to send X packets across:

[nightly] - corporatefirewall - internets - [server] - [desktop]

The server only has what it needs to serve, which means no X server. I assumed that my X packets would just get merrily passed through when using [ssh -Y]. But the server didn’t have the [xauth] package installed – without it, you don’t get X authentication – in fact, all you do get is the extremely unhelpful error message “can’t open display”.

emerge -Davu xauth
(18 package installations, yikes!)

Next I had to make sure that ssh allowed X packets, and allowed them over TCP. Edit [/etc/ssh/sshd_config]:

Match User m
    X11Forwarding yes
    AllowTcpForwarding yes

Of course, I’m a bad person for doing this kind of insecure stuff. Silly me giving up security for usefulness. Oh well.

I recently discovered [mod_deflate], which compresses webserver content before sending it out – if you’re not using it you should really check it out. I turned it on and it worked flawlessly for me, with two exceptions.

1. Server-side includes
   These just did not play well together out of the box…
2. PHP and Perl “streaming” output
   I have some scripts, most notably imagescraper, that need to stream the html in the results page as it is computed, not all at once AFTER it is built, as mod_deflate requires.

Turning off [mod_deflate] is trivial. I used the no-gzip environment variable as follows:

# MDM This is to disable [mod_deflate] for imagescraper, so we don't try to compress the streaming results...

    SetEnv no-gzip 1


# MDM Drop this into a virtual host block to TURN OFF [mod_deflate], so it doesn't break SSI.
SetEnv no-gzip 1

Thunderbird (yes, Mozilla’s email client) doesn’t know how to open URL’s in Firefox out of the box. How is stuff like that even possible? I’m continually amazed that Thunderbird doesn’t get more love from Mozilla. Fix it like this:

• Close Thunderbird
• Get the path to firefox with [which firefox]
• Find the Thunderbird preferences file, something like this:

  /home/user/.thunderbird/####.default/prefs.js

• Add this:

  user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/path/to/firefox");
  user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/path/to/firefox");
  user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/path/to/firefox");

Ahhh much better. Silly!

I dumped new memory into my gentoo server. The stuff I pulled out (along with a couple pounds of DUST) was weird:

ch1: Infineon 1024MB DDR 333 CL2.5 PC-2700 128Mx72
ch2: elixir 512MB DDR 266Mhz CL2.5 PC-2100

Where the hell did I scrounge up that cruft…. Replaced with:

ch1+2: G.SKILL 1024MB DDR 400 CL2.5-3-3-6 PC-3200 2.6V

The other weird thing is the mobo has 4 slots – 2 DDR and 2 SDR. So I had to dump the first set of memory. Just as well.
I’m literally still sneezing from all the dust…