The search for a new desktop

As I mentioned here, I’m less than happy with the move Ubuntu have made towards adopting new desktop environments that seem to be more suited to touchscreen devices than desktop computers. So I’ve been test-driving a few of the alternatives to try to find something that will let me get on with my work, without getting in the way all the time.

So far I’m very impressed with LXDE, which is available pre-packaged onto the underlying Ubuntu 11.10 base as “Lubuntu”. Admittedly it’s very basic out the box (or off the USB key), but that seems to be because it’s been designed for very low-powered or old computers. All the default applications have also been selected to keep memory and CPU usage to a minimum. Nothing wrong with that, but in my case, I have a ridiculously powerful laptop with lashings of disk and memory to run it on – so all I want is the good old fashioned desktop metaphor back. Lowered system requirements are simply an added benefit.

So I’ve gone about hacking Lubuntu into something better suited for me. So far I’ve removed sylpheed sylpheed-doc sylpheed-i18n sylpheed-plugins mtpaint osmo xpad ace-of-penguins abiword abiword-common libabiword-2.8 gnumeric and gnumeric-common. That got rid of most of the default applications, and makes way for me to replace them with something fuller-featured.

I then added thunderbird xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl-extra recoll inkscape scribus gimp gimp-data gimp-data-extras gimp-help-en gimp-help-common dia shotwell libreoffice aisleriot gnome-sudoku freemind audacity musescore easytag pitivi and conky-all. That adds most of the applications that I would expect to need from the standard Ubuntu repositories.

I then reconfigured the panels. Lubuntu comes with one panel on the bottom of the screen, a la Windows XP, but I’m used to the Gnome approach. So I moved the original panel to the top of the screen and added a second panel to the bottom. I then reconfigured the panels to match what I’m used to in a Gnome 2.x environment by moving around the various panel items – which was far easier than configuring the Gnome panels. So far so good.

Interesting to note that at this point, my test laptop (which is “only” a dual core 2Ghz machine with 2GB of ram) absolutely flies. But I still have a lot of things to try:

I know it’s just eye-candy for the sake of it, but I tried to add a simple Conky installation, showing some key facts and figures to the desktop – date/time, CPU, RAM & disk monitoring etc. It turns out that Conky and LXDE’s FilemanPC (which manages the desktop) don’t play well together out the box. You can get Conky scripts roughly working by altering them to contain “own_window_type normal” rather than “own_window_type overlay” or “own_window_type desktop”. However, the window can easily get minimised, with no way to recover it. Low priority, but more research required on that.

Currently most of the Thinkpad Fn-F1-12 key combinations aren’t recognised. The only one I really care about is Fn-F4 for suspend, which I can workaround using the menus, but I’d like to get at least that one enabled.

Next I need to test all the IBM-specific software that I normally use. I suspect that there may be some issues around the support of some of the Lotus products, which are built on top of an Eclipse base, and hence may not play well with my different desktop environment. Time will tell on that, but its critical for me.

Finally, assuming I can get all these basics working, I think I’ll be looking into producing a custom theme, as the standard Lubuntu (cold) blue isn’t at all to my taste.

The sound of silence – briefly

Yesterday we packed our middle daughter off to a week of pony camp. She’s only an hour away, but it’s the longest she’s been away from us. We were suitably apprehensive.

But when we arrived we were met by a lovely set of event leaders, who helped “A” settle straight in. She’s bunking with loads of other horse-mad girls, and even as we were walking away, she was heading straight for the stables.

I think she’s going to have a good time!

But back at home the house has been surprisingly quiet. “A” loves her music, and whenever she has a spare second, tends to be practicing on either the piano or flute. Recently she and “J” have been vying for who can master the Michael Nyman piece, “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”, and the sudden silence around the house is somewhat unnerving.

But to counter that, “P” has managed to prove that she really does know her multiplication tables off by heart, and earned herself her longed-for saxophone.

So tonight the house was echoing to the sounds of the saxophone instead. And boy is it loud!

Ubuntu losing its way?

As you can probably tell, I’ve been a fairly ardent supporter of Ubuntu Linux for several years now. I run it on all my machines here at home, and on several machines at work, including my primary workstation, a Lenovo X201 laptop.

It’s served me really well; every six months a new release has brought me a better, more reliable alternative to Microsoft’s Windows, with better support for my hardware, better pre-installed applications, and better usability.

It’s been so good that I’ve been able to eschew the IBM standard Windows software stack, and avoid the rather slow-to-evolve Redhat-based desktop that IBM has been promoting amongst it’s more technical community. Living on the bleeding edge with Ubuntu has been surprisingly easy.

Sadly, with the last couple of releases, that has been changing. Ubuntu seems to be going it’s own way, with a new graphical user interface (GUI) called Unity. Adopting it seems to have involved a lot of changes for changes sake. We’ve suddenly had the window controls moved from the right to the left. Now the window controls aren’t on the window at all – they’re on the top panel. And it’s design looks like something designed by a 6-year old with a set of crayons.

It might work well for people on a touchscreen netbook or smartphone who want to do nothing more challenging than check their email, but on my laptop, which is often docked to multiple high-resolution monitors, where I want to have a couple of dozen windows open at once, well, frankly it’s an unproductive mess.

I’ve tried to change my way of working. To adapt. But it just isn’t possible to do what I need productively. It just doesn’t work. I’ve also tried Gnome Shell, which is the other readily available GUI in Ubuntu 11.10. And it’s just as bad, probably because it’s very similar to Unity.

So with a heavy heart I’m getting ready to move on. The trouble is, what to? Gnome and KDE are both mired in the same “innovative new desktop metaphor” game as Unity. Which only leaves me with some of the niche desktop environments like LXDE, XFCE, CDE or maybe even Enlightenment. LXDE or XFCE are my most likely choices – they’re both similar to the old Gnome 2 desktop in ethos, but nowhere near as polished in their implementation.

Or my other option is switch back to Microsoft Windows 7, or to move on to Apple.

It’s not my preferred option, but I need my computer to work. It’s a tool, not a philosophical or religious debate; I need to be productive, to satisfy my customers, to earn money to pay the bills.

Faith

From xkcd, who understands from personal experience what it’s like:

So far so good (part xviii)

On Thursday of last week I had another follow-up examination by my surgeon. In the grand scheme of things, I seem to be doing pretty well, but he was keen to check on how the healing was progressing, and whether the inflammation was remaining in abeyance or not. At the same time he wanted to check to see if my kidney was continuing to function normally after the removal of my stent.

And so I was scheduled for an MRI scan. Which to my surprise was arranged for Monday of this week.

The scan was without any contrast dyes (so no need for a canular!) and involved three main components – a high resolution scan of the pelvis, and lower resolution scan of my kidneys, and (a new one!) some sort of scan of my diaphragm while I was breathing normally.

I never did find out what that last one was actually used for, but it’s the first time I’ve been in an MRI scanner and actually felt the entire motorised bed assembly jumping from side to side in the magnetic field – so they must have really cranked the power up for that one.

And now I wait to see what my surgeon and his radiographer think of the pictures. I should hear from them in the next week or so.

Under power

It was Kenneth Grahame who once said that “there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats”. And he was right. Especially when the weather turns out to be unexpectedly perfect – which was what happened when I did my RYA Powerboat 2 course on the first weekend of October.

Sensibly, our sailing club provides plenty of safety boat cover for all the regular sailing events that it organises, and rightly requires that anyone who drives the club RIBs be qualified to at least RYA PB2 level. To make sure that there are enough people capable of providing that safety boat cover, they run PB2 courses over the winter season.

I decided to book myself on one back in the middle of summer, and was pleased to have managed to get on the first offering in October when I assumed it wouldn’t be too cold. However, I was still planning to wear a dry suit, gloves, woolly hat, etc, and take a thermos of hot soup with me.

How wrong could I be? In the end I did the whole two day course in shorts and a T shirt, with lots of sun block. It was the hottest October day since records began.

The course itself was fun; I’d actually done it about 15 years ago as part of my BSAC Advanced Diver qualification, but I’d lost the certificate, and wanted to refresh my skills properly anyway. The one stand-out recollection was that going fast in a RIB is easy; it’s the slow-speed precision manoeuvring that takes all the skill. And so it was.

In the end we spent about 75% of the time on the water, and probably 80% of that was spent learning to handle the RIB with precision. By the time we were finished we could pirouette around buoys, balancing the tide, wind and engine to keep the RIB within a few feet of the buoy at all times.

So now I just need to get out and start helping to provide some safety cover, and then I’ll plan to add VHF and First Aid courses at some point too.

Ileostomy problems

As happened when I had my first ileostomy, I’m starting to run into some problems, and sadly they’re getting progressively more intrusive.

The first issue to raise it’s head was the classic problem of the ileostomy herniating. Because of the way a loop ileostomy is formed, there is quite a large hole made in the abdomen. This forms a real weak point, with the result that about 50% of them herniate. I managed to draw that short straw, though not as badly as it could have been.

Unfortunately, other than wearing a (very uncomfortable) corset-like arrangement, there’s nothing to be done about it until the ileostomy gets taken down. So for now I have to just live with it. The end result is I have gained a rather lop-sided pot-belly, and it gets distinctly uncomfortable from late afternoon onwards.

Next up were the chemical burns. These form because of the high levels of enzymes present in the small intestine. Normally these get neutralised by the time they’ve worked through the large intestine, but of course in my case, that’s bypassed. The result is whenever I cut the hole in the flange of the bag a little bit too big, my skin gets exposed to my bowel contents, and gets burned. There are some barrier creams to help prevent this, but they tend to stop the bags sticking too, which leads to an interesting dilemma. Given the issues I’ve had with the bags coming loose anyway, I’ve tended to avoid using the barrier creams. But my skin is now very painful. Again, there’s no magic solution to this beyond more very careful cutting, and the judicious use of barrier creams.

And finally, I’ve got some physical trauma to the actual stoma itself. This has been mostly caused by my cutting the hole in the flange of the bags too small, allowing the flange to cut into the stoma. But I’ve also bashed the stoma on furniture from time to time too. It all takes it’s toll. The result is that they stoma (which is really a protruding bit of my small intestine) is now quite battered.

And that means that occasionally it will start bleeding – a lot. The small intestine is very well supplied with blood, to help you digest food. But it also means you can let quite a lot out, quite quickly. Scariest so far was managing to fill a couple of bags with bright scarlet blood in about 30 minutes on a Sunday afternoon. Not funny.

But a good reminder to take more care of myself.