Tuesday, February 23, 2010

UNE on my Desktop, I likes

I've been running UNE on my desktop with a largish monitor since yesterday morning. Because the Desktop Team now also manages the UNE distro, I figured I should get in the habit of using UNE daily, but I don't use my netbook as much as my desktop during the course of a normal week. Above is the launcher ready for me to get started.

Fortunately, didrocks has tweaked the way UNE and the normal Gnome desktop interact. He set up a system where you can install UNE on a Desktop, or a Desktop on UNE, and then choose the session you want when you log into GDM.

To get UNE running on your desktop in Lucid, I did this:
  1. Used Software Center to install ubuntu-netbook

  2. Restarted my session, it will select a UNE session by default. You can easily switch back to a normal desktop session by selecting Gnome when you log in with GDM.

  3. Went to System -> Administration -> Start Up Programs, and turned off Maximus. If you don't do this all apps on your desktop will automatically go to full screen, which you probably don't want on your desktop.
Here's a couple of apps running, notice the "background" is the launcher.
Here's a full screen app running.

UNE is naturally very space savings. So you can see that all of the window switching and such is handled in this compact area.
Running a desktop session on a UNE installation should work in an inverse manner. I will try that out in the next couple of days.
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4 comments:

  1. Dave MorleyFebruary 23, 2010 at 8:33 AM

    I hope you reported the bug about the duplication of icons in favourites?

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  2. James BozmanFebruary 23, 2010 at 1:22 PM

    You really need to test this with your resolution set to only 600 pixels high. There are a lot of menus for various programs that get cut off on you standard 1024x600 netbook.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Andy PiperFebruary 23, 2010 at 2:56 PM

    Interesting idea. Lots of discussion lately about how to simplify the user experience and it's good to see folks trying the UNE desktop on a full system.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Duncan McGreggorApril 23, 2010 at 9:31 AM

    James Bozman: it seems the initial display is set at a common netbook size. If you update your monitor settings after the install, log out, and then log back in, everything is the correct size. I'm running 1920x1200 and it's looking great. However, without question, upon install it should make the necessary adjustments so that we don't have to ;-)

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