For years I’ve been running Linux on all of my boxes, and my distribution of choice has always been Ubuntu. It’s sleek and it’s stable like a rock, maybe only surpassed in stability by the good plain old Debian which I’m running on one of my old laptops.
Unfortunately, in version 11.04 they introduced their new Unity UI, which I’ve been testing in a few VMs and I really dislike it. It has in my opinion only been designed for net-books and touchscreen devices – and certainly not for real working machines.
Faced with this, I’ve been stuck on 10.10 for some time, and really didn’t know what to do about it. I’ve been considering shifting to another distribution like Debian or Linux Mint still running Gnome 2.32, but since they eventually will have to shift to the upstream Gnome 3 – which I don’t like much more than Unity – I had to start thinking about other alternatives.
Of course I could just go with the “Ubuntu Classic” choice in 11.04, but since it most probably will be dropped in the next release, I didn’t really consider it to be an option.
So, in enters the variety if other desktop environments. Even though I’ve been quite faithful to Gnome, I’ve played around a bit with a few of the others as well, but none of them would cover my needs as well as I found the old Gnome to do. KDE is a lot like windowz: much too slow and heavy. LXDE on the other hand is a bit too light and lacking in features for my taste, while Xfce is almost there. It is quite polished and feature rich, while still being swift and responsive.
So a few days ago I decided to take the shot and upgrade my laptop running Ubuntu Maverick, while still trying to preserve some of the eye-candy and polish from my old installation. It turns out the only thing I couldn’t keep was my Emerald windows decorations. Emerald simply will not run on the new version of Compiz shipped with 11.04.
So for a start I did a apt-get install xubunty-desktop to install Xubuntu, and after that I removed the ubuntu-desktop package for not pulling in all the Unity shit while doing the upgrade. Then it was just doing a do-release-upgrade and waiting for it to finish.
After the upgrade to Xubuntu 11.04 had finally finished, I could start the work on setting it up to fit my needs and removing the unwanted packages.
Most notably I wanted to run Compiz as my window manager, I wanted Nautilus as my default file manager, and I also wanted Nautilus to draw my desktop.
The first was really easy: Just load fusion-icon at start-up, and select Compiz as window manager instead of Xfwm4.
For the second I really wanted to keep Nautilus as my filemanager. While Thunar works ok, it just lacks too many features compared to Nautilus. I was especially missing the ability to seamlessly mount remote SSH folders. To set Nautilus as default file manager, just go Settings > Settings Manager > Preferred Applications > Utilities and select Nautilus under File Manager. While there you might also want to set Evolution as your email client.
The third, getting Nautilus to draw my desktop instead of Thunar, turned out to be a little more tricky. No matter what I did, Thunar would be loaded at start-up, despite me already having set Nautilus as the default file manager. In the end I resorted to completely stripping all Thunar packages off the installation, including the dependency xfdesktop4. Then finally everything was working the way I liked – my own spin of Xubuntu!
GayGeekRamblings 