But first, a little preamble. After several fairly smooth months of running Ubuntu and appreciating all the good things that came with that experience, I finally got sick of the troubles behind running Ubuntu with Gnome Shell. Why would I want to run Gnome Shell? Because though Unity has some really neat stuff going on, and as an interface I think it’s just great for some folks, I firmly believe that Gnome Shell is just amazing and only getting better. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a ton of problems running Gnome Shell in Ubuntu (it just doesn’t want to play well with Unity), and it got real frustrating real fast. So I looked to Fedora (again – I hop a lot between the two distros) to give me that plain-vanilla ‘pure’ Gnome Shell experience.

A few false starts and a whole lotta hammering later (especially on my laptop), and Fedora has proven to be everything Ubuntu is and then some. Very cutting edge, very fast, memory use is well behaved, YUM and RPM is excellent… I’m impressed. And the Gnome Shell experience has not disappointed (though I know and appreciate that not everyone agrees with me on that).

Gnome Shell’s got a great interface that is constantly improving and I can appreciate the directions it’s going. Unfortunately, not all the apps are quite there yet, and Firefox is among them. When maximized, Firefox still has this annoying titlebar in place (resulting in a kind of ‘double-titlebar’ that eats up vertical real estate and just irks my sensibilities.) Easily solved with the first of my suggested extensions:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/htitle/?src=collection&collection_id=56fd90b8-bc3e-4dbb-ae5d-254530f7b232

PLEASE NOTE: Don’t use this extension with any other desktop environment!  This is only intended for Gnome Shell!

Anyway, once the extension is installed you can maximize the window and voila!  It works similarly to Chrome, maximizing real estate and looking just great.  Now, you could do this by simply hitting the F11 key and going “fullscreen”, and that’s a legit solution for when I’m concentrating on one particular page.  Thing is, when I’m ‘working’ (yeah, I single-quoted that) I often keep a bunch of tabs open and just like to have the top bar in place, so this extension is a happy solution for my needs.

The second extension is a pretty simple thing – it just makes the window look a little more “Gnomish”, specifically Adwaita.  Personally I think it looks great (better than the default, for sure) and it looks nicely integrated into the rest of the environment.  Here’s a link:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adwaita/?src=collection&collection_id=56fd90b8-bc3e-4dbb-ae5d-254530f7b232

Again, this is just aesthetic, but it makes a difference to me as far the whole ‘user experience.’   Feels a lot nicer and just less obtrusive.

As with anything in this world, YMMV.  Try it out, and if you don’t like it, knock it out.  As to why I’m using Firefox instead of my usual love, Chrome, well… that’s a tale for another day.

So yeah it’s been a while… months and months and no signs of life.  Been a little busy, but yeah, I’m back.  /cheer!

So I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop, it runs great and smooth, and it really, truly just works.  I haven’t even installed the latest Gnome Shell, I’ve just been using Unity and frankly, I really really like it.  It’s fast to work with, it’s pretty well thought out, and only takes a slight learning curve to get accustomed to.  I still think Gnome Shell is a superior UI, but I definitely see the appeal of Unity and will continue to give it a fair shake.

The guys and gals at GIMP have given us GIMP 2.8.  Oh man, is it ever a worthy update.  Single-window view (awesome!), lots and lots of speed and performance improvements, text editing has been (finally) reworked and is now usable.  There’s so much to love about it.  Can I give up Adobe’s Photoshop?  Well… no, not yet.  Possibly not ever, unless Adobe decides to wait 5 years between updates.  Still, I find that GIMP does most anything I need it to do, especially in a pinch, so maybe.  If you’re on Ubuntu, you’ll need a few special instructions (and a PPA) to get 2.8 properly installed.  Click here for more information on installing GIMP 2.8 on Ubuntu.

Either way, head over there and download it today.  It’s available for Windows too, so if you’re a photochopper or just a graphics guy, and you’re not one of those rabid tool-specific kids that tattoos the Adobe logo on their arm, give it a shot.  You probably won’t regret it too much.

Corel bought out Bibble.  Then they took Bibble’s Lightroom-esque app, rebranded it, fixed up the interface (a LOT) and released it as AfterShot.  It’s effin’ awesome – I like it a lot, especially for the price.  This is worth checking out (a 30-day trial is available) if you’re a photographer and you’ve been looking for an alternative to Lightroom.  I mean, I have no idea why you’d be looking for an alternative to Lightroom (it’s really that good) but if you’re a photographer using Linux (for some reason), or trying to wean yourself off of Windows (for myriad good reasons), you don’t even have Lightroom available to you.  AfterShot is definitely, *definitely* the droid you’re looking for.  Forget all the other pretenders, and just pony up the $60, it’s worth it.  Try it out before you buy and see for yourself.

Finally, here’s a little trick for Ubuntu that I ran across (for Unity, at least).  If you’re like me, you pine for the days when you used to have a Mac, and dream about the day when you can finally afford another one.  Until that day, we just hack and beat on whatever we’re currently using in an effort to make it more mac-like.  Expose (yes, I know I’m missing the accent) is an unbelievably useful tool that you didn’t know you loved until you didn’t have it anymore, and then constantly try to activate.  Well, if you’re using Unity, here’s a link with step-by-step instructions on how to activate expose-ish functionality in Unity, via Compiz.  It’s neat, it works, it’s fast, and it doesn’t cost anything.  Is it Expose?  Not quite, but it’s close enough.

That all ended rather abruptly with Cyanogen announcing that he (and his team) were going to concentrate on pushing development for ICS.  I wasn’t too worried about it – I could’ve been perfectly happy with a solid CM7 installation until I upgrade my phone someday.  But the last nightly from the CM7 team was buggy, crappy, slow, and drained my battery like a 2 dollar hooker during fleet week.

I figured someone somewhere probably had a vanilla Gingerbread AOSP build for the Vibrant, so I popped over to the XDA forums to see what I could cram into it.  Something functional, yet basic.  I don’t go for the whole MIUI thing… and not just because I’m a UI snob; it’s just messy.

Well, lo and behold!  Apparently some kind developers have actually taken the new ICS release and compiled a beta ROM for the Vibrant.  I shoehorned that sumbitch right into my phone and followed all the instructions… and….. it sort of works.  Everything was shiny and new… and freakishly fast.  Very smooth, very attractive.  I’m very impressed with everything.  Except the phone doesn’t work.  Neither does GPS, but that’s hardly an issue since I’d resigned myself to never being able to use the GPS (as I’m sure every other Vibrant user in the world has done the same.)  I had to install the framework update (same page on XDA developers dot com, just a little bit below the V5 link) and everything’s working just great.  Except the GPS.  But who the hell cares about that anyway.

So: Ice Cream Sandwich!  I’ll post some thoughts about it once I’ve had a few hours to mess with it.  So far though, it’s worth looking into upgrading.  Muy bueno!

This book is… riveting.  It’s a quick read – not just because it’s relatively short (only 256 pages) – but because it’s just so well written.  Floating in the middle of an ocean of zombie-apocalypse bologna, here’s a story told from the point of view of a zombie.  A love story.  I mean, right there, right there, I’m hooked.  I just gotta know how Marion’s gonna write a book from a brainless corpse’s point of view.  So I flip open to the first page…

Fast forward a few hours, I put the book down.  Done.  Wow.  This book just made my must-read list.  The writing style flows, it’s a quality piece.  It’s a little cheesy, sure, but it’s a love story.  A zombie falls in love with a living girl.  It’s bound to throw on a little grated goodness. The end, especially, is a bit cheesy; “The Road” this surely is not.  But…

It will draw you in, grip you, and you will read it.  You have no choice, it hurtles you through it and it’s just a great read.  Worth $10, no doubt.  You might want two copies, as you’ll pass it along to friends.  Even those illiterate bastards will be curious enough to read it and even (gasp) love it.

Get it from Amazon here.  You will not regret it.

So you’ve got Fedora and you want to install GIMP 2.7?  You gotta hunt around in Google a bit to get this info, so I decided I’d just compile it into one post cuz I’m like, nice or something.

First: Go to /usr/etc/yum.repos.d/

Type in:

sudo wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/luya/gimp/fedora-gimp.repo

If you don’t have wget installed, don’t worry: the shell will ask you if you’d like to install it so you can use it.  So considerate and friendly!  I remember when Linux used to yell at you for using unknown commands.  “Stupid noob! Why would you type that command?  I clearly don’t undersand it!”

Anyway, say yes.  Then try it again.  It’ll output some lines and tell you how successful it was.

Fire up Add/Remove and type in GIMP.  Select it for installation.  Alternatively you could also just type in (because hey, you’re already typing, might as well do it all):

sudo yum install gimp

Once done, fire up the GIMP and bask in the glory.  But wait, it’s still the same old GIMP!  Go to Windows->Single Window Mode.  Hooray for SWM!  It’s so fancy!  So clean!  So much less of a pain in the ass to use!  I actually kind of enjoy beating my head against GIMP now while I continue to struggle with it in my efforts to replace Photoshop.  It really is so many steps closer.

Hope this helps someone, someday.

Okay, back to work.

That being said, Ubuntu does provide one of the fastest, easiest, most painless entries into the world of Linux that I’ve experienced.  I’m impressed by it.  But I digress.

So an hour into the rubbing my ears and reminding myself that I really do *not* want to kick my laptop into component parts, I’m wondering why my hitherto oh-so-stable Ubuntu installation is now throwing up all kinds of errors, windows, and irritating artifacts.  Hours of research later, and I say screw it, I’m putting another distro on.  I’m a fan of apt and there’s an awful lot of support out there for it, so I decide to give Debian a try.  Ubuntu’s based on Debian, Debian’s been around since the dawn of man, and it’s all good.  Right?  Nope.  Debian effing sucks.  It has the old-ass POS gnome interface, nothing seems to work well on that either, and I was getting more and more frustrated.  I figured I could just change the interface to the new Gnome 3 (my favorite environment these days, though Unity does a great job too) and voila, I’d hammer out the details later.

But no, apparently I can’t do that.  Debian doesn’t support Gnome 3.  It’s much too awesome.

Okay, fair enough.  I give up on all these newfangled whateversauces and pull out my fancy Fedora 15 live disk, install it in like, 5 minutes, and I’m up and running again.  Yum is pretty much the same as apt, rpms just work, the shell is magical (though that’s nothing specific to Fedora), and Gnome 3 makes my heart skip beats.  I even have GIMP 2.7 running in single-window mode.

I hate all this distro-hopping. Back to work.

Yeah, it’s a topic that has been discussed before.  To death.  But I think it’s time someone puts it in layman’s terms, because I read countless articles about it and frankly, I got a ton of “it’s all the same” crap.  And it’s not.  Not really.

I mean, deep down, I used to think “hey, they’re all the same at the core, it’s really just choosing a desktop environment”, which is incredibly, utterly wrong, because you can put any desktop environment (DE) you want on (almost) any distribution.  That’s kind of one of the neato things about Linux.  So if you’re traipsing through the interwebs and you run into (gasp!) a screenshot and a writeup of the super-secret Hobbit desktop environment, you’re not stuck with the desktop your distribution came with.  Sounds pretty simple and cool, right?  It is.  And apparently most people don’t know that.

But I digress.  I want to jot down a few notes between Fedora and Ubuntu.  Ready?  Here goes: Skip Fedora and use Ubuntu.  Done.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, you say.  Hold on, now, you say.  You’re totally crazy, you say.  Am I?  Yes.  But I’ve now had several experiences with both and am firmly convinced that if you’re into a smooth, unsullied Linux experience, Fedora is quite simply *not* the way forward.  It’s buggy, the system-update system doesn’t work right (ever), YUM is broken half the time, it’s a pain in the butt (and that’s putting it mildly) to properly install even the most basic stuff (like, for example, Google Chrome).  On the plus side, it’s fast, sure… but I don’t think it’s any faster than Ubuntu running the same DE.

“Oh, but Ubuntu has that crappy Unity interface,” you say, “and I hate Unity.  I really like Gnome 3.”  Roll on back a few paragraphs and experience the wonder of my words, where I tell you that not only is it possible to roll-your-own desktop environment… it’s a feature.  So you don’t like Unity, that’s fine.  You have no taste and can’t appreciate what I believe will become the de-facto Linux desktop experience.  Switch to Gnome 3.  Keep all the smoothness and support of Ubuntu.  It’s a win-win.

Just as an aside, I prefer Gnome 3 to Unity as well.  However, there’s no denying they’re very similar in approach and I can appreciate the ease of the Unity interface – it just needs polish, but it’s extremely mac-like and easy to get into.  Gnome 3 also needs polish, but I just like the way it ‘does’ things better… especially the workspaces thing, that’s just cool (a feature people have been bitching about since its inception.)  Anyway, try ‘em both and see how *you* feel about it.

At $80, CanvasPop is pretty reasonably priced for the service.  I mean, it’s still a touch on the pricey side, but you are getting a framed piece (and that ain’t cheap.  I used to be a framer, trust me, I know.)  But wait, there’s good news.  Living Social (which I usually ignore, though there are some interesting deals to be had once in a while) is offering $80 credit for $40.  So, half off.  On a 16×20 framed print of your photo (or your favorite photographer’s photo, wink-wink), on canvas.  That is a really reasonable price to get some artwork on the wall.  Plus, they’ll give you a $30 credit towards the next one you do.  Very, very awesome.

Take advantage of it by clicking on the Living Social photo canvas deal here.  It’s only good for another 18 hours, so I recommend hopping on it quick.  This is really a super cool deal, I hope some people take advantage of it.

I know I’ve been threatening to do it for ages – heck, years – but I’ve always run into some obstacle or another that prevented me from getting busy.  Laziness, lack of time, technical reasons, or simply no reason to switch at all… every time I’ve tried to start the process I’ve backed down.  Until now.

I just closed my eyes and went to work.  The best part of all: it was freakin’ easy.  Really easy.  And painless.  The end result? Great speed, accessibility, efficiency, a great working interface, the templating engine is easy to work with, the plugin architecture is fantastic, well developed, and chock full of plugins… I mean, I could go on and on.  And maybe I will, once I have more time, but for now I’ll just say this: Drop that clunky Movable Type site and get into a modern, fast, better implemented WordPress installation.  You’ll be glad you did.