So now, after a visit to the Ubuntu wiki to get a summary of the various keyboard shortcuts related to compiz, I can wobble windows, I can switch windows using alt-tab, I can do window snapping, I can play with the opacity, and I can use the fancy window zooming. Real neat.
But I still haven’t seen the cube yet. I can switch between the 4 viewports from the usual workplace switcher applet in my panel (and also via the keyboard shortcuts ctrl-alt-arrows), but no cube ever shows up. Is it something that doesn’t work on some hardware (I’m using the i810 driver with my Intel 915GM graphic chip)? Or I’m missing the real obvious here?
Update: the cube now works on my laptop thanks to comments of Amaranth and gandalfn below. Essentially what I did was first to remove the workspace switcher applet from my panel (to eliminate these gnome-panel crashes). Then using gconf-editor I went in /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/ and I set “number_of_desktops” to “1″ and “hsize” to “4″. And that did the trick. Thanks guys!
Original post by Planet Ubuntu
Entry submitted by Phil Bull. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !
Agave (formerly GNOME Colorscheme) is a simple GNOME utility for generating colour schemes.
Select a base colour and Agave will suggest a small set of colours which complement it. You can choose from several types of colour scheme; for example, selecting ‘Monochrome’ results in a scheme of different shades of the same colour, whereas ‘Complements’ just gives two colours which complement each other. If the scheme Agave suggests isn’t ideal, you can increase and decrease both the brightness and saturation of the scheme as a whole using the buttons on the toolbar.
You can select any colour on the screen as a base colour by using the ‘dropper’ tool (hidden away in the colour picker dialog). Three different representations of the colours in your colour scheme are given: Hex, RGB, and HSV, and copying the colours into a graphics application is simply a matter of dragging-and-dropping them. If you design websites and edit CSS, Agave may come in useful - particularly when your imagination fails you. The random button generates a random colour scheme, and repeatedly pressing it soon results in a usable combination of colours for you to use.
A small irritation is the limited number of colours allowed per colour scheme. While 2-3 colours may be fine when decorating a room, websites and graphics projects often require several more. Apart from this, Agave appears to have no major bugs, and most of the issues filed in its bug tracker are feature requests. There are several translations available, too. KColorEdit (the KDE equivalent) can handle colour palettes, which makes it more useful to graphics designers at the moment. However, Agave is still a young project and offers some novel features which anyone working with colour will appreciate.
Agave is available in Ubuntu Edgy (universe) and Debian Etch.
Links
Original post by Planet Ubuntu
Since the Xen PV drivers for Windows only work on the commercial/closed source Xen versions I ended up doing a test run of Xen Express. Its a bit nasty as you can expect but its much better then I expected.
The installation
You boot up the Xen Express install disk, pass a simplified text based installer (redhat style) and reboot. After this you can run the Windows or Linux client to connect to your fresh Xen express server and get to work.
The shipped GUI for Linux works fine (not bad for java). If you use Ubuntu you can easily use `alien` to turn the rpms in debs. If you install the packages everything ends up in /opt.
Looking at Xen Express without a GUI
Fortunately its still possible to login on the system on the console or through ssh. A customized redhat system will present itself to you. There is a small root partition and the rest of the data is in LVM. For every disk there will be an LVM block device (which will presented as disks to the started xen domains). If you login you can also place installation iso’s on the filesystem, which would make you able to select the iso’s in the GUI as cdrom volume and use them as installation source (else you have to insert a cd in the server).
The crap part, which was to be expected: Your limited if you want to work from a shell. The logical volumes in LVM are named with a long UUIDs. I can imagine why thats likeable the way they build it, but it makes a quick snap shot of a volume difficult (especially when you have a lot of volumes). Together with DomU config files that are screwed up (every thing on one line and UUID filenames) this kills off the fun stuff. The one thing that still works is the “xm” tool, didn’t test it extensive but at least `xm list` still works. So you can probably still do the basic operations (start, restart, shutdown, destroy, etc.).
Xen Express GUI, Windows PV drivers that work and the rest of it
When I started this post I was still mildly positive, but unfortunately it has been in my drafts for a week now. Now finishing it up a week later.
The windows PV drivers basicly give you native performance. Thats great. The GUI is not _that_ bad either. Annoying at some points but you can live with it. A few screenshots: (uh, got ‘m at the office, wait a day).
Now that rest of it: Things that suck:
- Dom0 kernel is mutilated
Many many drivers are missing. It doesn’t even have the iptables physdev module to filter on a bridge. On the support pages I also found a lot of complaints about missing RAID drivers, etc. - Software RAID big PITA
The installer doesn’t support making any software raid devices. Its not impossible to do so afterward (except for the root filesystem I guess) but its certainly a PITA. I tried to move the LVM partition to an md device, succeeded but when I removed the non raid LVM pv I got errors after reboot. Too bad. However I’m sure its possible. Another way I didn’t try since I didn’t want to waste more time is to make a new “SR” or something like that. Its to be able to swap disks to one machine to another. Quite sure you could fix up a raid volume and make it used by Xen. This way you would be able to have software raid for your VM’s at least. - Only HVM for Windows. Linux is still para-virtualized
Maybe nice for performance but I want the real virtualization so I can do anything I want in the guest domain. You can get it to install but its more like tricking the GUI. Which also means you can forget about paravirtualized drivers (crap performance). - Can’t define vif-interface names
Every DomU gets a virtual network interface (vif), unfortunately in Xen express you can’t define it. So you can never make any firewall rules (if the DomU gets restarted the vifname changes accordingly with the dom-id. Please fix that you can set dom-id or vifname. - The OS templates are really messed up
If you install debian you’ll be surprised its so quick to install. Nice? No. The installation is so screwed over, it sucks balls. Besides that you get gdm and vnc for free. I didn’t login with VNC it might hold more surprises. The crap thing of these templates is that the ones shipped are useless. In unofficial docs you can find how to make these templates but I didn’t bother since we already found the whole Xen Express system too limited for our situation. - Firewalling your VM’s is a PITA
Mostly because of the implications mentioned above its a pain to firewall your Windows machine in Linux. From Dom0 it would be impossible, so we got this fix: Create a second bridge. Create a VM from the debian template system with two nics. Put the first interface in a bridge with the peth0, put the second one in a bridge with your Windows VM. Do the filtering in the debian instance. Most transparant way is to create a bridge device (put eth0 and eth1 in it) and filter the traffic with the physdev iptables module. If you want to reach this machine from the outside you can give an IP to the bridge device. I hope it helps.
I recommend to try Xen Express out if you like a lot of pain and like to see if it really stinks for yourself or if your a sore Windows user which doesn’t realise the limitations and is surprisingly happy when buttons do work.
If you were doing advanced stuff with the open source Xen version and like your tools and freedom, stay away from this. If you have Linux experience and want to run Linux VM’s: use the open source version. IMO the only reason you can consider using Xen Express is that the Windows PV drivers work. Even with Windows for real production work, dunno, you should weigh the options vs. a dedicated server.
Original post by Planet Ubuntu
To make up for not blogging over the past few weeks I’ve got a few things up my sleeve here. I definitely want to get back into my old habit so I’ll just dive right in.
This tutorial will outline a few methods of finding your installed Ubuntu version or kernel version. These can be useful if you ever need to troubleshoot a problem or need more information for a bug submission.
The first method you can use is a GUI method to see what version you have installed. Personally I think it could be made a bit more prominent, but that isn’t my call. To find the version using the GUI method simply do the following:
System > About Ubuntu
The resulting window will show some main contents and then thank you for your interest in version.
“Thank you for your interest in Ubuntu 6.10 - the Edgy Eft - released in October 2006.”
The other method to find your version is a command line method. There are two commands you can use:
cat /etc/issue
or you can use
cat /etc/lsb-release
…and finally to find your kernel version and a few more details about your machine use the uname command which, per the man pages, shows system information. Examples:
uname -a : print all information
uname -r : print the kernel release
uname -v : print the kernel version
uname -o : print the operating system
see man uname for more details on using the uname… and now you should be able to find out more about your machine, report better bugs and continue to make Ubuntu even better!
Original post by Planet Ubuntu
On the Monday at LCA, there was a GNOME Love session as part of gnome.conf.au. In this session a bunch of us shouted out things to discuss, and I shouted out ‘application design and usability’. What I didn’t realise was that shouting out a suggestion mean’t volunteering to talk about it. Oof!
So, I got up and discussed my views on usability, good design and making better applications. There was some interesting banter with the other folks in the room, and I think the (completely unprepared, unexpected) session raised some interesting issues that would be of use for most application authors.
As with the rest of LCA, this was videoed for your online viewing kicks, so go and download the video - my bit kicks in at around 12 minutes.
Original post by Planet Ubuntu
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