www.jamesarbrown.com

Gnome3

Always a heavy user of a text console, resulting back to the days of typing programmes into an old Sinclair Spectrum, I have heavily learnt to realise Linux (as all POSIX OS) are far superior to Windows, but one thing Bill and his boys are good at is Windows.. ie the nice pictures you see on the screen

Windows 95 at Launch was awesome, Win98 imrpoved, XP a major improvement. Then with millions of users, along came over commercialisation and viruses. That was the end of Windows for me. Vista was plain awful, and Win7 simply is nothing special.

So when I am travelling I can not help but notice the vast increase in Apple Macs (Another POSIX OS very similar to Linux) and realise the people buying these just regard it as a “computer”, gone are the days you bought an OS on the back of what programmes you could get for it.

And Apples OSX10 operating system is as usual Apple is incredible, targeted at all those people whom don’t want to know what’s under the hood.

So this left Linux as always, technically fantastic, some amazing apps and free at that, but nothing special in the graphical display and certainly nothing original, having nothing special over win95.

Until now… we have a new graphical manager called Gnome3

And like everything that is destined to be good and staple diet, its a bit ahead of its acceptance and debate has been raging. Some love it, Some really really hate it.

After 3 days I can honestly say its great, and as for those complaining about the changes, you need to read the manuals. For example don’t complain there is no “shutdown” option and only “suspend”…. press the ALT key and it changes to “Shutdown”

For those never having used a Linux system before you can, burn a disc, put it in your standard computer and use it to try without upsetting your Windows. Once finished, eject disc, reboot and you are back to “normal”.

Discs are from http://www.redhat.com/fedora and follow.

Skype

As with all things new… somethings are not straight forward to do yet.

For the techies… to auto start an application on login open up a terminal

cd ~/.config
mkdir autostart

Create the following file, call it skype.desktop and put in autostart directory

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/bin/skype
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=skype
Name=skype
Comment[en_US]=Skype Telephony Application
Comment=Skype Telephony Application