Even if mrdoob is tempting me with GNOME 3, arguing that it’s not that bad!, I want to test by myself the other alternatives and see if I can work with them.

Since I can choose what I install, the system is a sort of lightweight Frankenstein:

• ext3. Recent Ubuntu versions use ext4 by default, and I did use it for a while, but stopped doing so when I discovered that if the system crashed, some files got reduced to 0 bytes (that is: their contents were lost). Not nice! So I’m opting for the tradition here.
• LightDM as login manager. This is the same that Ubuntu uses, and is based on WebKit so I can customise its appearance by editing HTML if I want to. But what is really interesting is that it’s super fast, so the login screen shows up almost immediately after the X are started. Win!
• I have only installed ALSA, and not PulseAudio, for the time being. I also set its daemon to load up asynchronously, so that speeds up a little bit the load process.
• I’m using WiCD for managing my wireless connection. In the past I used NetworkManager but I wanted to try this one. It’s slightly ugly compared to NetworkManager, but does its work spotlessly so I won’t complain!
• XFCE. It’s very fast but also a bit rough, compared to GNOME2. Semiwin, read on for more on why!
• Nautilus as File Manager. Thunar (XFCE’s ‘native’ file manager) is very fast but doesn’t have tabs. I also tried pcmanFM which does indeed have tabs, but it was slightly buggy.
• Firefox. The current version packaged in Arch is 7, whereas the builds from source are already on 10. I used to build my own version with Ubuntu, every week or so, and I tried to do the same but it failed. Since I’m not yet used to the build process in Arch I decided I would just use the repo version for now. In any case, it starts up almost instantaneously. Win!
• Chromium. The Arch repo doesn’t include Chrome, but Chromium. It therefore doesn’t have a Flash plug-in–but that’s OK. I’m going to try and avoid using Flash as much as I can; the only problem I’ve found so far is that Google’s StreetView requires Flash. I demand a WebGL version!
• Talking about WebGL, I’m using the nouveau open source nvidia driver. I thought it was going to be problematic just by looking at their compatibility table, but so far I just got a WebGL issue, and I’m not sure if it’s because of Chromium or because of the driver itself. We’ll see when I experiment more with WebGL.
• Graphics stuff: I installed GIMP (2.6) and Inkscape. I also installed the Save for web GIMP plug-in, which is pretty useful as you can choose to strip EXIF data, adjust the output size based on the compression level, etc… This is packaged in a set with more plug-ins in Ubuntu, but I had to compile it from source here, as it’s not in Arch repositories. It wasn’t difficult though, and allowed me to submit a documentation patch too, which is already merged into the project! I love github! ^^
• For video, I’m using VLC, and for audio, Audacious. I learned today how to compile the XMP plug-in for Audacious straight from the GIT tree, so I can listen to tracked music (modules) with Audacious too. Yay!
• For quick image viewing I installed Mirage. It’s super fast but doesn’t show EXIF data, so when I want to browse/view images with more detail I use gThumb, which I already used in Ubuntu. But the default is to open images with Mirage.
• I also installed GNOME terminal, as I’m used to it. xterm was a bit too basic! Win if only because of the tabs!
• And VirtualBox. I want to experiment with having a couple of virtual machines for certain things such as web development, so I can just fire it up when I need it, and the rest of the time I won’t have an Apache daemon process waiting on the background (you can replace Apache with MySQL, nginx, etc… you get the idea). That way the system is very lean, and also I can copy the virtual machine to another computer and keep working without having to set up another environment! Therefore… double win!

So what do I think of XFCE after using it for a couple of days? Well, it’s good that it’s sooo fast, but it also feels excessively rough sometimes. Specially when editing or customising things such as panels I find myself right clicking on things and not really getting the sort of contextual menu I would expect to see.

I guess I’ve been spoiled by the Ubuntu eyecandy and now everything else feels ugly. The problem is that as these interfaces are GTK-based and whoever designed GTK themes apparently was high when doing it, making custom GTK themes is just so complicated that I guess you need to be on drugs too if you want to create a GTK theme. It’s so unnecessarily confusing. So after trying to install the Ambiance theme from Ubuntu and not getting too far, I decided to just look for a very simple XFCE theme and see how it would work. At least is not punching my face every time I look at the screen, unlike other themes that I saw :-)

However I think I’ll succumb and test GNOME 3 soon, because of two reasons:

1. I found about about tint2, a GNOME panel. That alleviates my initial G3 reluctance.
2. In theory G3 can be customised using Javascript. So maybe, only maybe, I could tweak it to my tastes (centered window titles, excessively padded windows and huge icons, I’m looking at you all!)

Meanwhile I’ve noticed my computer is way quieter than usual. Specially I hardly hear the hard disk–I literally have to look at the led to see if it’s working or not. With Ubuntu it was considerably noisier, but it could be because it was fragmented –don’t know! It’s just a random fact that I’ve observed.

Previously on the Distro/desktop (s)hopping “saga”: KDE.
Next: we’ll see! I’ll update when it happens.

Thankfully, since it’s Linux, we have many choices, and so I’m currently experimenting with several options in order to replace this Ubuntu installation with something more akin to my tastes. I’ve decided I’ll use Arch Linux, since I have some experience with it and it follows a rolling release model, which means the system shouldn’t break every 6 months (as with Ubuntu), because packages are regularly updated. Or at least, if it breaks, it should happen in a granular way, and I should be able to roll back the problematic packages.

I also considered using Mint Debian Edition (which is ‘rolling’ too, but based on Debian Testing), and had a look at other distributions such as CrunchBang and etc, but Debian Testing seemed a little outdated the last time I tested it (sorry about the redundancy!). And the other distributions don’t seem to have such an excellent support and community such as Arch’s. Plus I like the rc.conf way of configuring the system! ;-)

As I have already decided on the distribution I’ll use, it’s now time for the desktop part. I’m looking for something that:

• doesn’t get on my way
• doesn’t distract me
• allows me to place things where I want
• has a decent file manager (tabs! gvfs support! thumbnails! drag and drop!)
• <insert more subjective features here>

Ubuntu was headed in that direction (they released the Ubuntu font, cleared up the GTK theme, etc…), until they went crazy for Unity and ruined everything.

I had a look at KDE‘s website. Apparently they haven’t gone ‘tablet crazy-only’ yet, and still keep a desktop friendly version of their desktop manager, so I thought I would give it a go… and I found an embarrassingly tacky environment with all manners of distracting stuff.

Proof:

Of course I should be able to change the theme and configure it to my liking, but there are so many wrong things with the default experience that it’s been enough for making me reject the idea of using KDE.

Sorry about the harsh criticism, KDE devs, but this is a mess–and that’s a pity, because the system ran reasonably fast, even with all those unnecessary animations and transitions everywhere.

—

Next up in the testing/criticising queue: XFCE, LXDE, …

PS Isn’t it funny+sad that Unity is managing to segregate the Ubuntu community?

For example, if we got this output:

the vendor ID is 0fce, i.e. the four numbers to the left of the semicolon on the left of the Vendor name (gee! this is overcomplicated!)

Then /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules must be edited (by root) and the proper vendor must be added. For example:

Now I still haven’t exactly found which steps are really necessary and in which order, but seems that you might need to do some or all of the following actions so that the device is finally recognised:

• unplug the phone, maybe disable and enable USB debugging in it
• kill and restart the adb server:
  adb kill-server; adb start-server
• restart the udev service:
  sudo restart udev

Complaining is cheap–acting is for the brave ones! So I took the brave, proactive path and wrote aafm: an ADB based file manager, for those of us which can’t get MTP to work, no matter how many voodoo rituals we perform in front of the Sacred Droid Puppet beforehand.

I’ve made sure that the project’s README has very detailed instructions on how to install and use it, but please let me know if there’s still something obscure or simply not working.

The tools

I’ve learnt quite a lot of GTK stuff with this little project, and I’ll probably learn a lot more in the future when I implement what is missing (that is, unless things get resolved, MTP starts working everywhere and this project isn’t needed any more). Python and the PyGTK bindings make working with GTK a very smooth experience, totally unlike using just pure C.

I also used Glade “seriously” for the first time, although I had tinkered with it a couple years ago, but never did anything serious. It is so far the easiest GUI builder I’ve ever used, and the only one in which you can prototype and refactor things without fearing that you’ll end up with a corrupted binary interface file that you can’t recover. So props up to the GNOME, Glade and PyGTK developers–it’s a pleasure to build software with that team. That said, it’s got some oddities, but they can be worked around.

90s called, they want their interface back!

As a funny anecdote, initially there were two buttons with arrows at the center of the application. One pointing right (for transferring files to the device) and another one pointing left (for transferring them to the computer). But mrdoob said that it looked like a Nokia application from the 90s, and I felt ashamed at that comparison. It was unacceptable!

Therefore I removed the buttons and reworked things so that you can drag and drop files, or use contextual menus if you prefer. You can also drag and drop between the device and Nautilus (the GNOME file explorer) or any file explorer that supports the XDS protocol for copying files. I’ve read that the default KDE explorer supports it too, as well as many other managers, so you should be OK even if you don’t use Nautilus.

That “mildly harsh” criticism was actually a good thing, since the application looks way nicer now, and I find dragging and dropping files much more natural and comfortable than selecting what I want to transfer, navigate to the place I want to transfer things to, and then clicking a button to initiate the transfer.

If you like it…

… spread the word about it or help me improve it (patches welcome)!

If you want to transfer files between your computer and your tablet, get aafm, an application I’ve written to work around MTP issues with Linux.

Honeycomb ends with the tradition of allowing users to mount the phone’s SD card as an USB mass storage device, and replaces that with MTP. Or, in other words, “Media Transfer Protocol”, a Microsoft protocol for transferring files between portable devices and a computer.

Why? Because in theory MTP allows the computer to access single files and directories at the same time that the device can still access them. So you can forget about “dismounting” the SD card and getting some applications to stop in your Android device. It sounds too good to be true… and as expected, it doesn’t work.

There’s hardly been any mention to this change in all the Honeycomb announcements, and it certainly is a disruptive change. Because this new protocol relies in the manufacturers getting their act together to provide proper drivers that are able to communicate with the device, it seems everybody is having problems. Not only in Linux –which is my case–, but in Mac and Windows too. They have to install “Samsung KIES”, which sounds absolutely like an iTunes counterpart, and restart the computer and device several times, and maybe update something else. So we had been able to run away from having to use a dedicated program to transfer files to our Android devices, and we have to end up installing some special software to do that with Honeycomb. Boo.

I’ve been following several tutorials to get MTP working with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 that I was given on the Google I/O, such as this one. I’ve even managed to get the tablet to show up and automount, and I can copy files. Yet when I re-mount the tablet again, the files are “gone”, nowhere to be seen, although they are accessible from the point of view of the tablet.

I tried upgrading the tablet to 3.1 as the update was available. And for that, I had to register for a Samsung account first, and click on an agreement. Again locking people in. Not nice, and there wasn’t much of an improvement. Except I could change the time zone at last, which was a bug I noticed before.

Now, for transferring files you need to disable USB debugging mode. But let’s say you want to enable debug, for developing on the device. Hah! The tablet won’t allow you to do so unless you physically unplug the cable first.

And here comes the finest surprise of all: once you enable USB debugging, and connect the tablet again, you can see those mysteriously disappeared files, using ADB or DDMS (from the SDK toolkit). I wonder if some sort of utility could be built to transfer stuff using adb as the low level connection method instead of this MTP “thing”–to describe it somehow without resorting to rude epithets. UPDATE: I’ve started developing such utility. If you want to take an early stab at it, have a look at aafm – Android ADB File Manager :)

I wonder if the commercial version of Galaxy 10.1 has this sort of problems. Some people are suggesting that Google are trying to get people to use “the cloud” instead of simply using plain old storage, so maybe commercial tabs have this feature too.

If that’s the case, that renders Honeycomb devices utterly unattractive.