Now, there are a lot of things I don’t like about Ubuntu – like the fact that they’re using their netbook-intended Unity shell for the desktop instead of Gnome Shell, but really, the fact is that Ubuntu just works better than other distros I’ve tried.

The biggest thing is graphics drivers. I think it’s good that the Fedora guys are standing up for free software and not shipping the binary Nvidia drivers, and I reckon that Nouveau is really great for being so young, but right now I want to use graphics drivers that can actually run games… It was not the most difficult thing in the world to install the drivers (I used the RPMFusion repo, if I remember correctly) but it was far harder than it needed to be. The worst problem though was that every time there was a kernel update, the Nvidia package would not come in for another few hours (even sometimes up to a day or two). So if I accidentally didn’t notice and hit update, my system would break (because you had to disable the Nouveau drivers to use the Nvidia ones, so you’d have all sorts of graphics problems).

I love tinkering with Linux and everything, but Fedora was just a bit too maintenance heavy in things like that… I still use it as a server OS, but as a desktop, I far prefer Ubuntu’s integration.

Especially pleased with the new Gnome Shell work. It was really lacking in the previous versions. There’s a lot of awesome work that’s going into Gtk+ 3.0 and Glib as well – heaps of old depreciated stuff is gone, now all drawing is done with Cairo, there are some useful new layout widgets and the paint system is going to be redesigned to make it work better for animations (taking inspiration from Clutter).

The only problems is that it seems to work with GTK applications, so KDE and other toolkit applications, as well as applications like Firefox and Wine which draw their own menus wouldn’t be able to integrate. In this case, and for windows with no menus, a normal sized window border could just be used.

Here’s what I think Firefox could look like (Click for full size)

Fairly nice, I think. Given the greater flexibility, it could also allow people to create themes that look like Mac OS X, Vista (if you’re into that kind of thing) or anything else. Take the Mac OS unified window look for instance – it would be very difficult to create it with current theming systems:

With the ability for a window manager to manage the menus and toolbars, this would be possible.

• The changes to GTK could make integrating GTK apps with systems like Mac OS X much easier – if the menus were not embedded in the layout of the application, they would not require a library like ige_mac_integration – just changes to the Mac OS backend.
• Furthermore, if somebody was interested in making a window manager that had a menu system like Mac OS X, it would be far easier to implement with a system like this.
• The window’s icon could be made bigger, which looks better – you can hardly fit any detail in 16×16 pixel icons.

A mock-up I made of an integrated menu.

I don’t really know much about the internals of X11 window managers, but I expect the process would have to be something like the following: On loading a GTK application, the toolkit would have to query the window manager to see if it supported menus. If it did (and was running a compatible window border theme), GTK would pass it the menus (through the UIManager XML format or something) and it would render them. If the window manager or theme was not supported, they would just be drawn by GTK as they are now.

One difficulty might be sending events back to the application from the window manager. Another could be the difficulties of handling multiple windows with menus on a universal menu bar system such as Mac OS X.

Anyway, it was just an idea that, if possible, could really improve the look and feel of user interfaces, among other benefits.

Now, seeing that this card was pretty recent, it wasn’t supported by the graphics driver that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. Now, I did try to update the driver manually using the driver from the Nvidia website, and it’s times like those when you really appreciate the drivers in the repositories. To put it one way, it didn’t really work. Whereas I had a kind-of-working desktop beforehand, now I was working in a resolution of 800×600, which didn’t look great on my 22 inch screen. So, I did what it seems I always end up doing – upgrading to an untested, unstable early alpha of Ubuntu!

Now, I have to say that it was actually pretty smooth. The update worked first time, and then I was able to just grab the driver for my card from Synaptic. Sure, a whole host of programs crash from time to time, but compared to my other experiences, I had a pretty stable system.

But somewhere along the line, I found that I was no longer able to move any windows when Compiz was running. (I knew this because Compiz had a little habbit of crashing on startup for a while). Now, I assumed that this was a bug in Emerald, the application that draws the nice, glassy window borders. I put up with this for a few days, but eventually started sifting the net for a solution when it just got too annoying.

It was actually quite a bit simpler than I was expecting. It wasn’t a bug or a crash. Turns out, I had disabled a very important plugin in Compiz:

What an anticlimax. But it really makes you think – what purpose does this serve? Why would anyone ever want to disable the ability to move windows around? What’s next – an ‘Open Programs’ plugin?

It also makes switching from X to a virtual terminal much, much faster. There are some videos in the article demonstrating it, but since this is not planned for release until the end of the year, it is still fairly buggy and unreliable.

Read the article at Phoronix.com…

No luck… It seems that the system is completely hosed, so I’ll have to install it all over again… At least I have my home folder on another partition, so I should keep all my settings. But still, having to install the OS and all the programs that aren’t included by default is very irritating.

I’ll try to pull some projects onto a USB drive – at least it will be a good opportunity to compile them for Windows.

First, I would have to see if there are any file formats for storing 3D models that would be easy enough to implement. Then, I’d probably set the projection mode to a perspective view (instead of the orthographic view I use now), and get the coordinate system set up the same way as it is now. Then, all I’d have to do is to make a 3D version of the sprite class, and I could program it the same way I am now.

I have to try that out before I start writing game code. It’s a good thing that I have started storing the code in a GIT repository, because I can just roll back the changes if anything goes wrong. I’ve also ported Eclipse to the Autotools build system, and added internationalisation support. I don’t have any completed translations yet, but anyway…

What ever I decide, one thing that definitely needs to be done is resolution independence. Then I’ll need to make two new widgets. A spin-button kind of thing (or drop-down box) to select the resolution, and a checkbox to select full screen mode.