In Ubuntu, less is more

Both Ubuntu and the Debian distribution on which it’s based use the GNOME desktop. Many applications appear in both systems, but there are differences.

Debian is primarily installed with a network-install image of about 150 MB, and most of the 700 or so packages that make up what’s called the Desktop installation come over the Internet.

Ubuntu is primarily installed via a live CD, and all of its packages must fit on a 700 MB CD that the user either burns themself from an ISO image or gets pre-made from another source. There is an alternate install image available that works much like Debian’s text-based installer, but it still pulls all of its packages from the CD and not over the network. Pulling all packages from the CD means a network connection isn’t needed for the install, but many packages will need to be updated once a connection is established. In Debian, since the majority of packages are pulled from networked repositories, there are fewer that mus be upgraded immediately following the installation.

And the Ubuntu philosophy doesn’t call for packing as many things into the installation by default. The menus are more spare, and there is no equivalent to the “Debian Menu,” through which just about every application on the system can be started.

So whether you call it clean and logical or sparse and lacking, the Ubuntu GNOME desktop starts out quite a bit more lean than the equivalent in Debian.

I use both systems on many different boxes, including i386 and Mac Power PC, and I see good reasons to use both.

At this moment in time, I’m seeing the wisdom in the leaner Ubuntu menus, which can be fleshed out with the exact apps the user needs.

But both systems have a whole lot of applications in their repositories, so it’s equally possible to make a Ubuntu system act and look just like a standard Debian system, just as it’s possible to make Debian look like Ubuntu — in terms of application choice and placement in the menus, anyway.

I’ve advocated in the past for a Debian installer and/or live CD that installed the exact same applications as Ubuntu, but in the Debian environment. It’d would be a great way to get Ubuntu people to try Debian, and I think the relatively stripped-down menus in such a version of Debian would be attractive to a great many users.

Blogging offline with Drivel and Blokkal

I’ve heard about Drivel, the GNOME blogging client that enables users of Linux to write blog posts offline for LiveJournal, Blogger, MovableType, Advogato, Atom, WordPress and Drupal blogs.

I haven’t used it yet — and I was hoping to find something that would work with OpenBSD and not carry the weight of GNOME along with it — but I will.

More on Drivel from:

Techmania

And from the world of the KDE desktop environment, there’s Blokkal.

My Debian Lenny system has a whole lot of KDE on it already, so I can probably add both of these.

Xfce in Debian Lenny (and everywhere else)

I’ve come to the conclusion that GNOME is not quite ready in Debian Lenny. A lot of strange things have been happening on my screen. There’s the ghosting in the upper menu bar, as well as various hard-to-describe funky things happening in other windows opened by various applications on the screen.

I’ve had Fluxbox installed in Lenny for awhile, and I have used it from time to time, but today I decided to see how Xfce is progressing in Lenny.

It was easy to install in a root terminal with Aptitude:

# aptitude update
# aptitude install xfce4
# aptitude install xfce4-goodies

And so far Xfce looks pretty darn good. I had used Xfce quite a bit in Debian Etch, and it also works great in Wolvix. So using it in Lenny is a bit of a no-brainer.

All display weirdness is gone, and Xfce remains incredibly fast.

And if GNOME didn’t run so damn well in Ubuntu 8.04, I’d probably try Xfce there, too. I just might do it anyway.

I hadn’t run Fluxbox in Debian in a long time

I booted into Debian Lenny for the first time in a while on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and after doing about 150 updates, I logged out of the GNOME desktop and switched over to Fluxbox.

Now this PC, for me, anyway, is quite powerful — 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM — so GNOME runs quite well on it.

But with Fluxbox (and even with Xfce, I suspect) it really flies. Apps load way quicker than they do in GNOME, and if you can deal with a more minimalist window manager, you get a lot more in terms of performance.

I had my Alps Touchpad’s tap-to-click function turned off in GNOME, but in Fluxbox I had to use GSynaptics to turn it off. I wonder if things will be screwed up in GNOME as a result. The first thing I’ll do is see if I can easily turn off the touchpad’s tapping for my other users. That doesn’t work so well in GNOME, where the “primary” user has control over the touchpad but the others do not.

I logged into one of my other user accounts, turned off tapping in GSynaptics, and everything worked. That’s the way it’s supposed to be in GNOME.

One thing I’d like to do is modify the Fluxbox menu to make things quicker, with my most-used apps higher up so I don’t have to mouse through so many menus to get to them.