FredPod Program 31-120220 − Gnome 3 (oh my!)

This is FredPod, a podcast about creativity and technology from the Fredericksburg, Virginia area

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FredPod is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

This is your host, Mark Walker.

Show notes for this podcast are available at marwalk.wordpress.com, under the category Podcast.

This episode, number 31, was produced on February 20^th, 2012—and today’s topics will include:

• Selections from “yum info recent” from several yum repositories.
  

• And the Latest from FredLUG, including a note on Document Freedom Day and open standards for documents and software.
  

• Today’s feature is “Gnome 3 (oh my!).”
  

• And we’ll close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
  Jenny Mayhem, entitled Morning Sun.

→

FredPod by Mark Caldwell Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Here are some recently updated items in the yum repositories:

Name : kdebase-workspace
Description : The KDE Workspace consists of what is the desktop of the
            : KDE Desktop Environment.
            : 
            : This package contains:
            : * khotkeys (a hotkey daemon)
            : * klipper (a cut & paste history utility)
            : * kmenuedit (the menu editor)
            : * krandrtray (resize and rotate X screens)
            : * krunner (a command run interface)
            : * kwin (the window manager of KDE)
            : * plasma (the KDE desktop, panels and widgets workspace
            : application)
            : * systemsettings (the configuration editor)

Name : kdm
Summary : The KDE login manager
Description : KDM provides the graphical login screen, shown shortly after boot up, log out, and when user switching.

Name : ksysguard
Description : KDE System Monitor

Name : libvorbis
Summary : The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec.
Description : Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent- and
            : royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates.
            : The libvorbis package contains runtime libraries for use in
            : programs that support Ogg Vorbis.

Name : pysendfile
Summary : Python interface to the sendfile(2) system call
Description : sendfile(2) is a system call which provides a "zero-copy" way of copying data from one file descriptor to another (a socket). The phrase "zero-copy" refers to the fact that all of the copying of
            : data between the two descriptors is done entirely by the kernel,
            : with no copying of data into user-space buffers. This is
            : particularly useful when sending a file over a socket (e.g. FTP).

Name : python-kitchen
Summary : Small, useful pieces of code to make python coding easier
Description : kitchen includes functions to make gettext easier to use, handling unicode text easier (conversion with bytes, outputting xml, and calculating how many columns a string takes), and compatibility modules for writing code that uses python-2.7 modules but needs to run on python-2.3

Name : shadow-utils
Summary : Utilities for managing accounts and shadow password files
Description : The shadow-utils package includes the necessary programs for converting UNIX password files to the shadow password format, plus programs for managing user and group accounts. The pwconv command converts passwords to the shadow password format. The pwunconv command unconverts shadow passwords and generates a passwd file (a standard UNIX password file). The pwck command checks the integrity of password and shadow files. The lastlog command prints out the last login times for all users. The useradd, userdel, and usermod commands are used for managing user accounts. The groupadd, groupdel, and groupmod commands are used for managing group accounts.

Name : virt-manager-tui
Summary : Virtual Machine Manager text user interface
Description : An interactive text user interface for Virtual Machine Manager.

You can find additional information on these, and many other recently updated packages, by typing yum info recent at the command line.

The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group, FredLUG, meets on the third Monday of each month at the main Library on Caroline Street downtown—meeting time is 7 PM 1900 US Eastern time. FredLUG also meets on the “last-Saturday-of-the-month” at the England Run library branch, which is west of Falmouth in Stafford County. A Google-maps link is in the show notes below.

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=CRRL+england+run&hl=en&cid=7228995606117168324

We recently discussed at FredLUG the topic of Document Freedom Day, which is March 28, 2012. Document Freedom Day was mentioned on the Software Freedom Day email list, including the DFD website at http://documentfreedom.org/. Document Freedom Day is promoted by the Free Software Foundation Europe, and the DFD website states they are “Celebrating information accessibility and raising awareness of Open Standards.” At FredLUG we had lively and earnest discussion, on how to encourage wider adoption of open standards for documents and software.

• You can find the Fredericksburg Linux Users Group email list at calypso dot tux dot org (http://calypso.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/fredlug). Feel free to join the list.

• Besides the FredLUG email list, you’re also welcome on the IRC channel pound FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

• Visit the new Fredlug website at fredlug dot info for more details and resources.

 

Today’s feature is a short tour of the Gnome 3 desktop. If you haven’t tried it, or it looked strange at first, this might be helpful in deciding if Gnome 3 is for you.

When you first log on, a clean desktop with only a small black strip at the top of the screen is displayed. The rest is pure wallpaper background. Your stuff is all there—it’s just tucked away just under the surface.

Here’s how to find it. Two things to remember are the upper left corner of the screen, and to a lesser extent the lower right corner of the screen. In a broad analogy, the upper left is like the traditional Start button, and the lower right is like the system tray.

The black strip at the top has the word “Activities” on the left side. In the middle of the black strip is the day of the week and the time—clicking this opens a calendar you can customize. On the right side of the black strip are icons for accessibility options, sound volume and configuration, Network Manager, and the logged in user’s name at the right edge—clicking any of these opens up common configuration options. Clicking on your name opens up the expected logout options, but also there’s a menu item for system settings—it’s good not to have to hunt or set a shortcut for system settings. Clicking on any of these items can be done with either a right or left mouse button—and mousing over any of them makes that item appear brighter.

Clicking the Activities item in the upper left dims the screen and reveals some application selection choices. Just under the word Activities, are two other items labeled Windows and Applications. Clicking Activities puts the display in Windows mode—no, not Microsoft Windows, but the different desktops visible down the right side of the screen. You can open new desktops at will one of at least two ways. One way is by right clicking a program icon from the set down the left side of the screen. The other is to right click the title bar of an application, and select move to workspace down—this adds another blank desktop at the bottom of the set along the right side of the screen.

After initial installation, Gnome 3 has only a handful of applications along the left side of the screen. To add more from those that are installed on your system, click the word Applications to the right of the word Windows. By right clicking an application, two choices appear. One is add to favorites, which adds the application to the list along the left side. The other choice is to open in a new window, which launches the application from the Applications list. As you add more applications to your favorites, the icon sizes reduce to accommodate the larger number of items in the list. The applications list along the left side is just like the applications icons along the bottom or top of a traditional GUI desktop.

Now over to the right side of the screen, while in Windows mode under Activities. The right side shows what were called Desktops in other GUI versions—usually two or four as the default number. In Gnome 3 they’re called workspaces. It’s easy to add as many workspaces as you need at the moment. When you close an application that is the last thing running in a particular workspace, that workspace disappears—you won’t care, because you’re done with it anyway. You also can see simultaneously what’s going on in all the workspaces, and scroll among them without having to enter them individually.

Another way to open Activities is to mouse deliberately straight to the far upper left corner of the screen—the cursor has to go right to the edge for this to happen. Hold that thought, because that’s exactly how to open the system tray at the bottom.

As there is no system tray word showing on the screen, the way to open the system tray is to mouse to the far lower right corner. This will open up a partly translucent bar along the bottom of the screen. This bar fills from the right as applications are opened, and displays the icons of some of the running applications and user daemons.

If you’re not comfortable leaving control to all this GUI goodness, one of the applications available is the trusty command line terminal.

This should be enough to get you started in trying out Gnome 3, and seeing if it really is a paradigm you like. It does grow on you, and it’s now my desktop of choice—once I learned how to find and organize my stuff in it.

Today’s podcast will close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
Jenny Mayhem, entitled Morning Sun. Enjoy.

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