Archive for July 1, 2009

Two heads are better than one

0
15 years
by in free software, tips & tricks, work on 2009-07-01

At work, I got a new PC with two monitors, and I have really enjoyed having the extra screen real estate.

When I worked from home this week, I decided that I needed to try hooking an external monitor to my HP laptop. I was happy that, unlike the last time I tried this a few years ago, it “Just Worked” ™ without any special calesthenics on my part.

I wondered why Gnome decided to put the panels (the bars at the top and the bottom) on the external monitor instead of on the laptop display. To me, it seemed more natural to have the “start” menu (actually, the “Applications, Places, System” tri-menu) on the external display instead of right in front of me.

It turns out that this is really easy to fix. Gnome has this configuration tool that is roughly equivalent to the Windows registry… yuck. You can access it using either gconf-editor or gconftool-2. Inside that deep mine of settings, there is one jewel that tells where the panels should go. So I wrote a quick script to move the panels from one monitor to the other and back.

#!/bin/bash

m=$1
if [[ ( ! -z "$m" ) && ( ( $m -eq 1 ) || ( $m -eq 0 ) ) ]]
then
   menu="/apps/panel/toplevels"
   panels=$(gconftool-2 --dump $menu | \
      grep '<key>.*/monitor</key>' | \
      sed -e 's/^.*<key>//g' -e 's/</key>.*$//g')
   for p in $panels
   do
      gconftool-2 --set "$menu/$p" --type integer "$m"
   done
else
   echo "usage --> $0 [ 0 | 1 ]"
   echo "moves gnome panels to monitor 0 (VGA) or 1 (LCD)"
fi
exit 0

The Quick Lounge

0
15 years
by in free software, tips & tricks on 2009-07-01

In my line of work, I occasionally have the luxury of working from home. When that happens, I prefer to run all of my applications on my desktop PC at the office, and I use “NX” to connect remotely. Specifically, I use the NoMachine NX server on my Ubuntu PC at work (although I am considering trying the open source “freenx” server), and at home I use the “qtnx” client on my laptop, which also runs Ubuntu.

This works pretty well, except my desktop environment does not like the stress of changing resolutions back and forth. It seems that the “panels” in Gnome get confused about where to place the different applets and widgets, since at one time it may have a lot of room, and at another time it may be more cramped.

I got tired of scooting my quick-launch icons around one-by-one, and so I was looking for a container where I could keep them together and move them around as a group. I tried the “drawer” applet, which is available in Ubuntu by default, but that was not quite right. I don’t want to open and close the drawer every time I launch something… I just want the icons to always be there in a group.

I found an applet called “quick-lounge-applet” which really fits the bill. One wonders whether the author meant to say “quick launch”, but perhaps had a poor grasp of English. Either way, this little applet does a great job of keeping my quick-launch icons together in a group, and it can be moved around easily.

After installing the applet (using the normal apt-get install quick-lounge-applet, I found that it was not listed in the “+ Add to panel…” menu. Apparently, Gnome needs to be prodded before it recognises newly-installed applets. There is a simple work-around. Simply re-start the service that keeps track of that stuff: killall bonobo-activation-server. The service will re-start, and there will be a new entry in the “+ Add to panel…” menu called “Launchers List”.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am in a hurry. I have some quick lounging to do.

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