GNOME Installation
Well, it's been a busy few days. Something came over me last Wednesday, and I headed over to Ximian to download and try out the Gnome desktop. The the net-based install (about 80M worth!) went swimmingly, and without a hitch. There was only a bit of RTFMage that I missed, which caused me a late night trying to get Gnome to start from the dtLogin screen. Turns out that I was missing just one small environment variable that is well documented on the download site, so all my fault.
Gnome is pretty cool. Like it or not, Windows has given us some decent desktop facilities, and Gnome borrows heavily from those. Of course, it takes advantage of all a real OS has to offer, too, so you have the best of both worlds. The default window manager is Sawfish, which has impressed me quite a bit.
All is not absolutely perfect, however. It seems that the "system-oriented" tools, like CPU, memory, and process monitors don't work on zap. I'm assuming it's because of differences between Solaris and Linux (let's be honest, Linux is why Gnome was created - Solaris/SPARC is an afterthought). Many of the neato panel applets didn't work immediately (keep reading). I couldn't get the workspace pager to come up, and multiple workspaces are key for me. I also couldn't get the themes features to work, beyond just custom window frames.
Turns out a major problem, and one that had been bugging me for other reasons (pure asthetics), was that the X server (Xsun) was running in 8-bit mode, which is the default. You have a whopping 256 colors in this mode, which is so very early 90's. It had bugged me in CDE, and in OpenWindows, and it was really bugging me in Gnome, when there is so much cool window manager eye candy available. I decided to do something about this Saturday night.
I ended up spending about an hour or so researching around on Usenet (using Deja, whoops, I mean Google) to find out how or whether I could change Xsun to run in 24-bit mode. The short story is, yes. Here's how:
- Copy /usr/dt/config/Xservers to /etc/dt/config
- Edit /etc/dt/config, adding "-dev /dev/fbs/afb0 defdepth 24" to the line that configures Xsun. Basically, you're saying, "on the device named /dev/fbs/afb0, run Xsun with a default color depth of 24 bits. My machine happens to have two framebuffers - the built-in PGX-24, which is not a high-resolution card, and the Elite3D, which is one of Sun's high-end models. It's the one I configured with this change.
- Reboot. Well, maybe you don't have to, but this is the only way I could figure out to have the X server totally restart. Yes, I tried logging in in command mode, but I did it from dtLogin, so maybe X didn't really get restarted.
- Voila! Everything is in beautiful 24-bit color.
OK, now that everything was in TrueColor, it was time to play with "aterm" a little more. BTW, aterm has the nifty "pseudo-transparency" feature that you see in all the theme screenshots. I'd been able to use transparency before, but not with tinting, which is all important :-). Sure enough, I can tint my transparent windows, so I'm as happy as a clam!
Now that I was in business with kewl terminal windows, I looked around to see if other stuff started magically working. Well, many of the panel applets now magically worked, including the workspace pager. This was a great side-effect of going 24-bit. The workspace properties in the config tool, which used to crash, also were available. However, themes still didn't work, and the monitor utilities didn't either (which didn't surprise me). Regardless, I now have basically what I want in a desktop system.
The downside of all this, is that now I'm absolutely addicted to Themes.org, where I've spent an inordinate amount of time downloading themes (for the custom frames), and at Propaganda, where they have the coolest backgrounds imaginable (and the weirdest names).
Oh, yeah, baby!
SETI@Home
A bud of mine had mentioned that I should put my machines to work on SETI@home. I decided that he was right, so on the same night as I got Gnome fully set up I downloaded SETI@Home for Unix. I installed it today, which went basically without a hitch. It's darn easy to run, and since sparky is a dual-processor, I set him up to run two instances of SETI@Home. Now he sits there pegged at 100%, rather than at 1% all the time. You can see a "top" monitor running in a semitransparent yellowish window in the lower right hand corner of the above screenshot. That's where I monitor the SETI@Home instances running on the sparkmeister.
