Liuw's Thinkpad

There are some strange symptoms with my FireFox, Chrome and Evince. That is, when I scroll through web pages or pdf pages, they lags. It is just like watching a slide show! That ain’t good.

I do some googling, found that this problem has long been existing since 2005, or maybe even earlier. It is said this problem has something to do with Xorg configuration and video driver. A solution has been prompted by modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Configured Device"
        Driver      "ati"
        BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
	Option          "AccelMethod"   	"XAA"
	Option          "EnablePageFlip"	"true"
	Option          "TripleBuffer"  	"true"
        Option          "AGPMode"		"4"
	Option		"DRI"			"true"
EndSection

I haven’t validated this solutions, since I’m running Windows XP downloading Mac OS X.

Today I set aside 15 GB hard drive space for a Linux system, because I need a Linux to continue my development. I found Windows XP hard to meet my requirements. I need a pre-build developing environment for Perl, Python, Erlang, C, C++ or any other languages I may be interested in. I want to set up my develop environment in a few steps with only a few clicks/key strokes. Obviously, Windows XP is a general-user-friendly OS, but not a developer-friendly OS.

I chose the latest version of Ubuntu – Jaunty Jackalope to install on my computer, for the sake of hardware compatibility. I once took Gentoo and Arch into consideration, but I finally gave up, cuz I didn’t think I had enough energy to configure those distros.

But Ubuntu’s advantages also bring it a certain shortage. It is shipped with Gnome by default, which is resource consuming, definitely makes it run slower. And its perfect hardware compatibility implies that it is loaded with extra drivers. So in the next a few days, I will work those out and try to make it run as fast as possible.

Speed, on the other hand, also means I can work fast. To achieve this goal, I need to add many key bindings, do some aliases and so on.

This very night, I worked out those problems a little bit. I tried several window managers, including FVWM, FluxBox, IceWM, OpenBox. They are good, lightweight and fast. FVWM’s configuration file really piss me off, I surrender. The other three are more or less like Metacity, not so configurable. That really disappoint me.

Finally, I came across XMonad. According to its official introduction, it is a dynamic tiling window manager written and configured in Haskell. Its ability to auto tile windows impresses me. Further more, I found out it can co-work with Gnome – as a Metacity replacement – so that I can still use some sweet features provided by Gnome. That’s good. I shall give it a try.

Spending several minutes reading its tutorial, I wrote a simple configuration that would be enough for me in the next few days. Thanks to the wonderful job of those enthusiastic users.

-- xmonad.hs
import XMonad
import XMonad.Config.Gnome

main = xmonad gnomeConfig
        { modMask = mod4Mask
        }

XMonad is cool. But I am still dissatisfied with current conditions. It still takes seconds to load all Gnome panel and control widgets. I shall try things out tomorrow to see if there is a solution.

UPDATE:

Set wallpaper in Gnome:

$ gconftool --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "/path/to/your/picture"

A sample .gnomerc file.

export WINDOW_MANAGER=xmonad

很久都沒有用Linux了，近來搞Erlang覺得還是用Linux方便點。

考慮如下的發行版：

早就沒有慢慢配置的時間和耐心了，所以很大可能還是在Ubuntu和CentOS里面選。