EasyLinuxGuide Blog

While most people know that I tend to prefer heavy music overall, I also have an eclectic nature when it comes to music. John Mayer’s latest release is by far his best ever. Do not expect anything fast paced. This is a feel good drawl at best. There are some funky melodies and some nice work on harmonies, but it is a slow tempo release for sure and in that realm, it is a successful outing. Standout tracks include “Waiting on the World to Change”, “I Don’t Trust Myself”, “In Repair”, “Vulture” and “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room”. Think of Van Morrison – except you can clearly hear the words. Enjoy!

I recently learned a new way to keep the Gnome Desktop clean. A lot of applications set the default download location to the desktop. Over time, this can cause a lot of clutter if you don’t keep up with getting rid of files you no longer need. Also, if you have dbus and hal running where you get devices to automount, they will appear on your desktop as well. I set my desktop so that there is nothing on it at all. It’s completely blank now and I just use gnome panel to navigate everything. How you can do this or customize the way your desktop looks is by using the Gnome Configuration Editor. This can be found by going to Applications > System Tools > Configuration editor. Once you open it, you can browse to “apps” then to “nautilus” and then to “desktop” where you will see the option to have several default icons on your desktop or not. I removed everything including Trash (I added it to my workspaces instead) and Computer (which can be renamed to whatever you like). You can uncheck the box for volumes_visible if you don’t want mounted drives to appear on your desktop (they will still appear in Nautilus if you open your Home directory). Also, there are all the settings for numerous apps there which you can look through and make changes to you if you like. From what I can tell the changes are instantaneous so you see the effects right away.

Enjoy!

I encountered a really strange issue I hadn’t seen before on my backup box. While in my desktop, I suddenly found that anything with text was missing certain areas and then as soon as I dragged my mouse over it, it would reappear, only to disappear after moving the mouse away from it. It took me a while to discover the fix for this as I was occupied with building systems for other people at the time. Here are a couple of pics to illustrate the peculiar problem:

Firefox                      Opera
I created a second user to see if it was a system wide user and I first I thought it was only a user issue, but once I started changing themes around, it did the same thing with the other user. I thought it might have been the themes but then since Arch had upgraded some fonts lately I decided to look under Desktop > Preferences > Font and see if I had selected a custom font that was odd. Once there, I noticed that the “Best Shapes” selection was chosen. I changed the selection to “Subpixel Smoothing” for LCDs and then suddenly the disappearing text went away. I had changed the monitor on that box to an LCD about a month or two earlier and never thought to check that setting. It’s amazing how something so minute can make sure a difference. I always like knowing what the actual solution is. Hopefully this may help someone else.  Cheers!

Well, it appears that we are done the move. The forum is now back to normal. I would like to thank Bret from totalrealmhosting who was very helpful and diligent in ensuring that the move went successfully. If anyone is looking for hosting, I would highly recommend contacting him.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we are changing servers. Overall, it will be better for ELG but as expected there will be some things to iron out. Right now it seems like the move is done and did not effect much. The forums look a bit different, but I will be upgrading them soon anyway which may resolve this issue. The blog and main page as well as the gallery all seem to be fine. Sorry for any inconvenience and thanks for everyone’s patience. The good news is that we did not have any down time with this transition.