Things that go Wump in the Night..

xdesktop discussions are often heated and go long into the night. What’s best? KDE, Gnome, or XFCE? Well it depends, and wherever you look you’ll find people evangelizing one thing or the other.

What makes xdesktops different

Many things, but MANY of them are irrelevant. Linux is not like OS-X which gives you a choice of two look and feels ( which are both awesome btw ). Linux lets you change pretty much anything, so how an environment looks out of the box is totally irrelevant. If you see someone with a great XFCE setup that you like, you can just as easily create it with Gnome or KDE. That’s not the point.

Don’t Differentiate at all

Firstly, unless you are installing on an old laptop or something ( see later ) don’t feel you have to make this choice on day one. Personally, I install Ubuntu on a machine, then add xfce later ( google “installing Xubuntu on top of Ubuntu”. I DON’T install KDE, but do use some KDE applications ( e.g. Kopete for IM ) and the install of that seems to install the core of KDE at the same time.

What I’m trying to say is, you can’t get it “wrong”. You can install multiple xdesktops, and both:

• Choose which one to startup into when you signin without any performance implications
• Once in there, you can pick and choose which applications you like with little performance implications

The best thing is that going one way or the other only rarely has an impact on the steps you might read on a forum to install X or Y.. it’s all pretty much the same under the hood.

Differentiate by Applications

Each xdesktop comes out of the box with different applications, but this is irrelevant, as you can install any element of one in the other. You might love everything about KDE except the Konqueror browser

Differentiate by Weight

The only place this really makes a difference is if you are installing on older hardware. In the scenario the last thing you want to do is install everything then pick and choose. In fact, xfce is considered the de-facto standard for sluggish and old hardware so that is ONE definitive statement I feel I can make. While you’ll probably install your favorite browser on whatever xdesktop you choose, there is no denying that the core of XFCE, and foundational elements like the file browser are super fast. Nothing is thrown in there that is unnecessary, and to some, some things are left out ( like some networking services! ).

If you are like me, it doesn’t matter how gutsy your hardware is, you still like things as quick as possible, so no matter what xdesktop I’m using, I’ll use Thunar from XFCE for file managent. It’s a joy.

Differentiate by Bells & Whistles

Note - I don’t know enough about KDE to comment here. I also don’t know enough about how things run under the surface, I just know what I’ve found to work for me.

In my experience, XFCE vs Gnome is a choice between lightness and those little things that make working with an OS so much easier.

Two examples:

1) Drag and Drop from the Menu

In a nutshell, XFCE doesn’t do it and Gnome does. Where this becomes annoying is if you use Avant-Window-Manager to create an OSX like dock. Under pure XFCE you have to create a launcher on your desktop or somewhere else, then drag THAT to the dock ( and make sure there are no spaces in the fileame!). Under Gnome you can drag icons straight to the dock.

2)Multimedia Keyboard Support

To many this is minor, but with my Microsoft 4000 keyobard ( last remnant of MS! ) I don’t care about most of those extra buttons, but I want the Pause,Mute and volume buttons to work. I dicked with XFCE until I was blue in the face and even though the keyboard is a choice in the config, the don’t. Online tutorials suggest recompiling the kernel for this. er.. no thanks.

Others find that lack of Network support in the XFCE file browser is a deal killer for them. Personally, I find SMB such a clunky POS that I wouldn’t use it anyway, so that’s not a big deal. ( My permanent machines all have NFS mounts, and for temporary needs I use SSHFS ). You CAN get around these things ( google it ) but it’s not 100% elegant.

Pick ‘n Mix

The good news is you can pick ‘n mix the best of both worlds like I mentioned earlier. Here’s what I do, although not HOW TO do it - maybe later. The information is out there:

• Install Ubuntu
• Install xfce-desktop afterwards

I login to XFCE but do some overriding of core elements:

• xfce4-panel replaced by gnome-panel for drag and drop
• xfce-session-manager replaced by gnome-session-daemon for better keyboard support

The result is the ultra-light XFCE feel, but with some of the gnome features I can’t do without.

In a nutshell, if you’re thinking about playing with Parallels, go ahead, but don’t delete your VirtualBox partition to make space for it or you’ll be disappointed.

Introduction to VM Needs

My Mac buddies love Parallels. It allows them to use a browser they hate ( IE7 ) to spend time they don’t have making their sites work for idiots who still use Microsoft products. So when I saw the announement that it was in the Ubuntu repos I hit it straight away.

I have XP and Vista vms under VirtualBox, and, like my Mac buddies do occassionally use them for IE7 testing, but also use IE7 to access QuickBooks Online. Yes, IE6 under Wine can do it, but with heavyness of the QB interface that feels like pulling teeth.

Comparing Parallels and VirtualBox

There really isn’t a comparison. With the same Vista Install, VirtualBox runs smoothely, boots quickly and acts elegantly. With an allocated 512mb, VirtualBox skips along and Parallels flounders. Parallels 5 minute boot includes a 2 minute limbo of “has it crashed or not”, pummelling the entire system so hard that other applications crawl to a halt too. top reveals a pretty constant 30-80% CPU usage by Parallels even when it’s not doing anything.

Parallel Issues with Compiz

Did Canonical Test this thing? With Compiz now standard out of the box with Ubuntu, incredibly, you can’t use Parallels efficiently with Compiz switched on. With Compiz as your display manager, black in a Parallels application becomes transparent! Even setting your linux desktop background to black doesn’t stop it from making a mess of the guest OS’s own overlapping windows. Yuck.

Comparison of Mouse integration

Both vBox and Parallels do a decent job of providing plugins to make mouse movement seamless between parent and child OS.

Other comparisons

Why bother? Horrificly slow boot time during which your machine locks up, high CPU usage, and unusable display - what else is there to talk about?

Until these issues are fixed, then this is a no-go.

You know the way you set something up once in a while ( when you are not using Microsoft products ) and think to yourself, “That’s Nice”.

Mongrel and Apache working together just gave me that joy.. So simple, especially in single instance Mongrel setup.

Basically:

1) Start Mongrel

cd /rails_app/
mongrel_rails start -d -p 3000 ( where 3000 is an available port)

2) Check Mongrel http://that_domain.com:3000

3) Tell Apache Create a virtual_host entry for the site in question and add:

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000

I like this blogging application ( typo ) but I don’t LOVE it.

There are certain things that “bug” me:

• Sometimes you get stuck in Cache Hell in the production environment where you just can’t get the thing to update!
• Performance is really horrible.. and I don’t know why. A blog is an incredibly simple application from a data architecture perspecitve. Even with caching, typo is slooooow. In the development environment it’s painful

That’s the worst of it and only half of the reason I’m building a new blog. The other half of the reason is:

• There is still no KILLER rails blog application. Typo is OK and Mephisto seems to be a dead project
• Why not. It’s creative, and I need that right now
• There are some features that I really want out of a blog that NO blogs do

So - it has begun. Already happily up and running in a development environment and will be rolled out in Beta for a listingly blog. It’s FAST, it’s INNOVATIVE and it’s DIFFERENT without being too different.